OTC forwards, swaps, and structured products for the GPU compute market. Bringing transparent price discovery and hedging to AI infrastructure.
GPU compute is the most important commodity of the AI era. Nascent index and OTC infrastructure is emerging, but no integrated offering yet combines a credible benchmark, a trading venue, and institutional-grade settlement.
H100 one-year rental prices rose 40% in five months, from $1.70/hr to $2.35/hr. Enterprise buyers had no institutional venue to hedge this exposure.
Three competing indices, very few transactions, and no integrated offering for index access, a trading venue, and settlement.
On-demand GPU capacity sold out across all types. Blackwell generation fully booked through late 2026. Marginal compute almost unobtainable.
Cash-settled forwards and swaps referencing published GPU benchmark indices, with settlement on the Canton Network. Voice-brokered initially, following the same model that launched every major commodity derivatives market.
Buyer pays a fixed GPU-hour rate; seller pays the floating index rate. The buyer's effective cost is locked in. The standard entry point in commodity OTC markets.
Agreement to buy or sell GPU capacity at a fixed price on a future date. Cash-settled against the published benchmark index at the contract expiry date.
Settlement on the arithmetic average of daily index values over the contract period, matching how compute is consumed as a continuous flow.
OTC derivatives require trade-level privacy, atomic settlement, and programmable financial contract lifecycle management. Public blockchains cannot deliver this. Centralised exchanges lack programmability. Canton provides both.
No institutional participant will trade on a platform where positions, counterparties and trade sizes are publicly visible. Canton's permissioned architecture ensures trade-level privacy by design, a regulatory and competitive requirement for derivatives markets.
Daml models the complete lifecycle of financial contracts: creation, novation, exercise, settlement, margining. It achieves the precision of ISDA documentation in executable code, purpose-built for financial instruments on distributed infrastructure.
All legs of a transaction succeed or fail together, eliminating settlement risk entirely. As the market matures toward complex structured products (options, capacity swaps, multi-leg instruments), atomic settlement becomes essential infrastructure.
Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, Deloitte and Microsoft are already Canton participants. Their technology, legal and compliance teams have assessed the infrastructure, so a new Canton-based product can be approved without starting the process from zero.