Engy lists frontier open models at the lowest prices found, Kimi K3 35% under Moonshot (engy.ai/pricing), and runs a chain-verified buyback: $150,666 burned since 12 Aug (ledger). The paid models run on Engy's own hardware, no revenue figure is published, and on 12 Oct the owner stopped auto-locking its 18% cut (extrinsic 9267109-2).
| Claim | Who said it | What the check shows |
|---|---|---|
| "Lowest price anywhere" on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash; Kimi K3 35% under Moonshot | @engyai, 12 Sep | Holds on list prices (table below). No contract price is published. |
| Revenue "$1–2K a day", about $15K consumed, $150K deposited, about $100K of it Jacob Steeves' | Ning, fund call 17 Aug 2026 | The company's only revenue figures. Paul, same call: "those numbers are kind of useless"; the enterprise counterparty was refused twice. |
| "ARR on engy is now 3.5m–4m usd"; "100% MoM in revenue" | @AlgodTrading, 22 Sep | Writes as a principal but is unidentified. Holds only if every token served is paid at list. |
| "Most of our revenue" goes to buybacks | Ning, fund call 17 Aug 2026 | 23 burns, $150,666, 12 Aug–11 Oct, on chain. Untestable against revenue, which is unpublished. |
| Engy serves "~70% of our judge calls, ~1B tokens a day" | Albedo (SN97), 7 Oct | A customer's usage statement; payment not stated. Albedo is a Dendrite subnet, inside the ecosystem. |
| Product | Pay-as-you-go API, OpenAI and Anthropic formats, nine open models (Kimi K3, GLM-5.2/5.3, DeepSeek V4 Flash, Qwen3.8, MiniMax-H3 video and others) |
| Who serves it | Seven of nine models run "only on hardware engy operates"; only Qwen3.6-35B goes to subnet miners. Miners handled 1.52M of 4.99M requests this epoch (30%) |
| Usage | 1.33M requests and 19.7B tokens a day over the last week; 24-hour success rate 84% |
| Named users | Albedo, SOMA, Pareton (all subnets), Jacob Steeves' prepaid balance. No customer outside Bittensor named; absent from OpenRouter; on Architect's router since 7 Oct |
| Company and people | Hanlin AI (also SN11). Ning Ren, founder, ex-Google Brain by his account; "Paul", commercial lead, unidentified; one salesperson |
| Team size, checked | Three people have ever committed to the public repo; last push 29 Sep. The serving stack is closed, so the repo understates the team |
| Capital | OTC refused to all comers: "we don't need capital". Paul sold half his alpha and will not lock the rest |
| Third-party benchmark against Chutes or Fireworks | None found. A "BlueTAO" coding test cited by TAO Daily (30 Aug) could not be located |
| Engy's telemetry | Time to first token 0.5–12.6 s per miner; gateway uptime 99.84% over 90 days (/status) |
| Model correctness | Miner responses carry a TOPLOC proof against the pinned checkpoint; the TEE lane and first-party models rest on attestation or Engy's word |
| Model | Engy | Chutes | Maker | Engy vs Chutes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kimi K3 | $1.95 / $9.75 | $3.00 / $15.00 | $3.00 / $15.00 | 35% cheaper |
| GLM-5.2 | $0.68 / $1.50 | $1.25 / $3.95 | $1.40 / $4.40 | 2–2.6x |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash | $0.045 / $0.09 | $0.44 / $1.32 | $0.30 / $1.20 | 10–15x |
| Qwen3.8-27B | $0.045 / $0.32 | $0.24 / $2.20 | $0.50 / $3.00 | 5–7x |
Chutes serves only from attested datacenter GPUs; Engy from consumer and non-confidential ones plus emission-paid overflow. Chutes could copy the edge by relaxing its TEE rule.
| Floor: largest open-model API vendors | Fireworks over $1B annualised, July (company); Together about $1B (Sacra estimate) |
| Ceiling: enterprise model-API spend | $12.5B in 2025, closed models included (Menlo) |
| Comparable valuations | Fireworks $17.5B, Together $8.3B (both July 2026); OpenRouter to Stripe, reported $7B+ (Stripe) |
| Engy against it | 0.1–0.3% of Fireworks. Distribution, not size, is the constraint |
| Who | What they do | Per day | Customer money? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Miners (18 UIDs paid) | Serve Qwen3.6-35B and overflow, 30% of requests; paid in alpha by billed tokens | $32.7k | No: customers pay Engy |
| Validators and stakers | Score Engy's request log; staking yields 20.4% a year in alpha | $32.7k | No |
| Hanlin AI, the owner | Runs the API and the clusters serving seven of nine models; keeps all billing plus the 18% cut | $14.4k + billing | Yes, the billing |
| Alpha holders | Supply shrinks by the burn | $3.7k | Yes, burns verified on chain; not traced to billing |
| Cadence | Seven-day epochs scored from that week's request log |
| Entry cost | 0.0005 τ registration, a GPU box (two RTX 4090s), then probe traffic passed at 99% success and unpublished latency limits |
| Scoring | Tokens served × a per-model rate Engy sets, counting only paid requests; with no billed traffic the weight goes to the owner hotkey and is burned |
| Miners paid, on chain | 18 UIDs across 17 coldkeys; top six hold 66% of incentive; epoch count fell from 199 (26 Aug) to 20 (7 Oct) |
| Validators | 13; Engy's own takes 39.3% of dividends; all score Engy's request log with Engy's code |
| Paid (TEE) lane | Published onboarding flow; Engy verifies each box over an SSH channel only it controls, then activates it (docs) |
UIDs paid each day, from chain (block 9,256,182); the owner's key is excluded because the chain burns its share. Engy's epoch count fell from 199 (26 Aug) to 20 (7 Oct); the chain paid 18 UIDs on 11 Oct.
| Open | Miner clients, validator, proof spec (no licence file) |
| Closed | Gateway, billing, probe control plane, first-party serving stack, and any rule tying the buyback to revenue |
| TAO the network injects | 37.6 τ/day = $10.9k/day; 11th of 93 subnets |
| The owner's 18% cut | $14.4k/day, $5.24M/yr at spot |
| Owner coldkey holding | 140,323 α = 2.7% of circulating against a cut of 1,296 α a day: the cut leaves the key |
| Owner lock | 152,127 α (3.0%). Auto-lock of the cut switched off by the owner coldkey at block 9,267,109, 12 Oct 12:25 UTC (extrinsic) |
| taorevenue, 30 days | Burn $114.1k, owner inflow −$18.5k (taorevenue); the buyer wallet is not the owner, so inflow misses it |
| Mechanism in code or docs | Stated on the provider site; no code, no rate |
| Burns on chain | 23 add_stake_burn calls from wallet 5Ccg2r…, 18,185 α; the 11 Oct one decoded on the archive node (taostats) |
| Volume matches the claim | Untestable without a revenue figure. Burns equal 47%–129% of implied list billing over 30 days |
| Against owner issuance | Burn $3.7k/day against a cut of $14.4k/day: net +$10.6k/day of new alpha to the owner |
| Plan | Status |
|---|---|
| Enterprise contracts "$1–2 million just for Kimi" (Paul) | Never named |
| Own B300 clusters, US colocation (Ning; @AlgodTrading) | Claimed bought |
| Permissionless worker onboarding | Published; Engy activates each box |
| Router distribution | Architect live; OpenRouter absent |
| Referrals: 10% of a referred customer's API spend for 12 months, in USDC or credits | Live 11 Oct (@engyai); no uptake figure |