POD Miner

An autonomous, self-funding inference business

Version 0.1 — August 2026

Abstract

POD Miner is a software agent that runs a compute business with no human in the loop. It earns USDC by serving open-model inference on the UsePod marketplace and spends that USDC renting GPU capacity on Vast.ai. It holds its own Solana wallet, makes its own treasury decisions under an open, community-auditable operating skill, and is designed to be profit-seeking from the first box it rents. This paper describes the architecture, the economics, the capital rules, and the governance model.

1. The business

Inference is a commodity market with a simple structure: buyers route to the cheapest eligible provider, prices are capped by centralized alternatives, and reliability compounds through reputation. Margins come from one place — serving more tokens per dollar of rented compute than the price floor implies. POD Miner is built around that single equation:

profit = 0.8 × price × tokens_served − box_cost

Every design decision in this paper follows from maximizing utilization of the cheapest reliable hardware that fits a competitive model.

2. Architecture — one agent, two runtimes

POD Miner is one agent — one Solana wallet, one ClawPump identity — with two runtimes that share a single operating procedure:

Component	Holds	Does
POD Miner Cloud (hosted runtime, clawpump.tech)	Solana wallet (ClawPump custody)	Decides. Funds. Verifies on-chain. Reports.
POD Miner Edge (Hermes runtime, VPS)	A revocable ClawPump API key — wallet-tool access via MCP, not the private key	Drives the executor; hunts bargains; enforces discipline; reaches what the cloud runtime can't (shell, SSH, boxes).
Executor (service on the VPS)	Vast API key	Enrolls hosts, rents boxes, installs the UsePod agent, wires config.
Ops wallet (hot keypair on the VPS)	One bond + gas at most	Signs the on-chain bond instruction.
UsePod	Marketplace	Routes demand; pays 80% of billed tokens.

The custody invariant: the wallet's private key never leaves ClawPump. Edge can request sends through the MCP tool ceiling (plain transfers, swaps) using its revocable API key, but it cannot sign arbitrary transactions, and the key can be killed from the dashboard without touching the treasury. Cloud keys (Vast) live only on the executor; the runtime that can move money never holds them. A compromise of any single component cannot drain the treasury.

3. Machine economics

UsePod's market rules shape everything:

A provider's listed price is capped at the cheapest centralized price for

that model.

Routing picks the cheapest eligible provider; reputation (uptime,

latency) only breaks ties.

An offline or throttled host earns nothing and damages the reputation that

future routing depends on.

Therefore the selection policy is:

Minimum VRAM class, never above it. Idle VRAM earns nothing.

Classes: s = 3–8B models (16GB), m = MoE 30–35B active-3B or 27–32B dense Q4 (24GB), l = 70B Q4 (48GB).

Cheapest reliable box in class. Hard floors: reliability ≥ 98.5%,

inbound bandwidth ≥ 500 Mbps, disk ≥ 1500 MB/s. The floors are never lowered to find a cheaper box.

Continuous bargain hunting. The fleet scans the market every 30 minutes

and flags offers below 0.7× the class median. Bargains justify scale-out when earnings cover them — never churn of an existing host.

Utilization is the real risk. At the 35B-class floor

($0.05/$0.10 per million tokens in/out), a $0.13/hr box breaks even near 600 tokens/second sustained. Below that it bleeds slowly; above it prints.

4. Capital and the bond

UsePod requires a $50 USDC bond per host, posted on-chain as a deposit_usdc instruction carrying a unique per-host deposit code. The rules that govern this capital:

One bond per machine. Bonds are never shared, reused, or pooled.
Refund path: retire the host, then a mandatory 90-day cooldown. An

unretired host forfeits. Retire → destroy → calendar the refund.

Churn is capital-negative. Swapping machines locks a second $50 while

the first sits in cooldown. Hosts are keepers, not experiments.

The ops wallet never holds more than one bond plus gas. The treasury lives

in POD Miner's own wallet; withdrawals from UsePod flow back to it.

5. Autonomy boundaries

POD Miner operates under a published skill — a written operating procedure the community can read and improve. Its hard limits:

It can only send funds to the ops wallet (host operations) or an explicit

withdrawal destination.

It cannot rent above a model's VRAM class, lower reliability floors, or

invent payment flows.

If a send would exceed its balance, it stops and reports

INSUFFICIENT_FUNDS.

The skills are versioned and developed in the open: github.com/fraserbrownirl/podminer-skills.

6. Token (future)

No token exists today. If and when host earnings justify it, a token may be launched through ClawPump to let the community share in the business. The principles: launch only against real revenue, transparent treasury, and the operating skills remain public regardless. Any announcement will come from the official repository — treat any other "$PODMINER" as counterfeit.

7. Risks

Demand risk: utilization below break-even bleeds the treasury slowly.

Mitigation: small cost basis, ruthless box selection, scale only on earnings.

Marketplace risk: UsePod pricing rules, caps, or bond terms can change.

Mitigation: the skills are parameterized, not hard-coded.

Counterparty risk: Vast hosts can go offline. Mitigation: reliability

floors, reputation-weighted selection, fast destroy-and-replace (after retiring on UsePod).

Key risk: mitigated by the separation architecture in §2.

8. Roadmap

Now: first m-class host live and earning; console observability;

skills repo public.

Next: competitive MoE model serving (35B-A3B class) via llama.cpp;

automated earnings → scale-out loop driven by the bargain stream.

Later: multi-host fleet with per-host P&L; token launch against proven

revenue; community governance of the operating skills.

POD Miner is an experiment in autonomous business. Its operating procedures are open source; contributions are welcome.