10.The Four-Class Market

Markets form around valuable things that can be specified: described in a standard way, transferred in a standard unit, and trusted by strangers. Value alone has never been enough. Grain was valuable for ten thousand years; grain futures required standardized grades and bushels. Software components were valuable for decades; a component economy arrived with package registries. The distributed AI economy in this guide's title is a claim that AI work is now crossing the same threshold, and the preceding sections have quietly assembled the three preconditions, as specifications rather than shipped fact (FAQ 15 keeps score): units of AI work packaged (Nebi manifests, Section 8), contextualized (Frames adapt them to any installing organization, Section 3), and verifiable (declared Validation Strategies, Section 6). Remove any one and exchange between strangers stays artisanal. With all three, it can industrialize.

Four artifacts, four economies

Ops trade like products. Outcome-shaped, installable, versioned: the natural commercial artifact, offered under subscription, usage, or outcome-based terms. The pricing backdrop is shifting toward exactly this shape: Gartner (cited in Deloitte's TMT Predictions 2026) projects at least 40% of enterprise SaaS spend moving to usage-, agent-, or outcome-based pricing by 2030, and AlixPartners' 2026 software outlook is blunter still: "established software companies must now consider dismantling the pricing models their businesses were built to deliver." An Op, priced per run or per outcome, is native to that world rather than retrofitted to it.

Cogs trade like labor. Specialized workers, offered under whatever arrangement fits: rented, purchased outright, given away, subscribed to. A firm with deep expertise in, say, clinical coding can sell the worker without selling the workflow.

Frames mostly do not trade at all, and that is the design. Here Section 2's non-rivalry note pays off. Context costs nothing to share and gains value when counterparties adopt it: a consortium's compliance Frame is more valuable to every member when all members use it; a company's Partner Frame works precisely because it is given away to partners. So the paper predicts most Frames circulate free, as coordination goods, the way open standards and shared vocabularies always have, with a commercial tail where the context is genuinely scarce expertise (a top firm's methodology, a regulatory specialist's encoded judgment).

Guards trade as trust. Communities publish open Guard libraries the way they publish test frameworks; specialist commercial Guards encode regulated-industry expertise, the paper's examples being a healthcare community's HIPAA privacy Guard, a financial consortium's KYC source Guard, a legal group's contract-citation Guard. Guards also grease the other three markets: an Op that ships with well-known, community-vetted Guards is easier for a stranger to adopt than one asking to be taken on faith.

And one artifact class is deliberately excluded. Tracks stay home. They are the sensitive evidence of what an organization actually did, and the paper is explicit that they should remain inside the Hub that produced them, with only anonymized or aggregated Track data informing marketplace quality rankings and trust signals. An economy is defined as much by what it refuses to trade as by what it lists.

Who shows up

Much of the right-hand column is not money. Influence, alignment, adoption of one's vocabulary, reputation: these are the currencies open-source ecosystems have always run on, and the paper's marketplace is designed to run on them alongside cash rather than instead of it. The paper's own summary of the whole construction is the one to quote, with its provenance attached:

What the compression leaves out is whether any of it compounds, and that question turns on the network dynamics of open standards, taken up next.