Declining token prices have prompted Darkbloom, a distributed inference network, to reassess its business plans. Darkbloom , a project from Seattle-based tech biz Eigen Labs, has developed software that allows anyone with a sufficiently capable macOS device to rent their GPU through the Darkbloom network for interference jobs. In return, they get paid. Through this network, 800 or so participants – including as of two days ago this reporter – have been able to collect a few cents to a few dollars per day by having their hardware handle AI model prompts submitted through OpenRouter , an AI model gateway. In theory, someone running one of Apple’s recently released Mac minis with an M5 Pro chip and 64 GB of RAM could earn as much as $192 per month handling incoming inference jobs, per the company’s estimate. That assumes full 24/7 utilization during this period on a sought-after model like Qwen3. 6 35B A3B, which sells for $0. 065/M input tokens, $0. 75/M output tokens. But not every network participant has fully surrendered their Mac hardware to the network. The median earnings of the 50 people on the leaderboard amount to about $5. 26 per day, $159. 86 per month, or $1,918. 50 per year. So the best case estimate presented by Darkbloom looks plausible. But it may not be sustainable. The price of tokens – the unit of AI work – has declined, reportedly down 54 percent since May . Ramp’s AI Token Price Index , which tracks the price of tokens from Anthropic and OpenAI, shows similar slippage. For Anthropic, the price per million tokens went from $2. 65 on May 1, 2026 to $0. 62 on October 22, 2026, a decline of 77 percent. In a message shared with Darkbloom participants on the company’s Slack channel, Kydo, one of the Eigen Labs researchers working on the distributed inference network, celebrated the network’s processing of its trillionth token while attempting to moderate expectations about the project’s viability. "Earnings have been low," said Kydo…