Darkbloom warns Mac compute providers that plummeting AI token prices are crushing daily payouts

Eigen Labs has warned participants in Darkbloom, its decentralized compute network that rents out spare Mac processing power for artificial intelligence inference, to brace for sharply lower earnings. The top 50 operators on Darkbloom's leaderboard show median earnings of $159.86 per month, or about $5.26 per day, but Tom's Hardware calculates that a 77% drop in token prices would shrink that figure to roughly $1.23 per day. [1][2]

The pressure stems from a rapid plunge in commercial token costs, with Anthropic token prices sinking from $2.65 per million tokens on May 1, 2026, to $0.62 on October 22, 2026. Eigen Labs researcher Kydo noted that Nvidia clusters in traditional data centers have increased output roughly 20-fold this year, allowing them to slash prices dramatically. Compounding the issue, Darkbloom's primary client, OpenRouter, has shifted routing priorities toward prefill and decode speeds and quantization, putting participants without Apple's top-tier Max or Ultra chips at a distinct disadvantage. [1][2]

To survive the market shift, Darkbloom plans to steer providers toward higher-demand models and explore non-inference tasks, such as distributed CI/CD pipelines for AI agents. The project also plans to look beyond OpenRouter for buyers and explore clustered, high-end Mac Studios utilizing Apple's Remote Direct Memory Access over Thunderbolt. [1][2]