Upbit lists Dolphin's POD, an AI inference network token; price doubles in first minute

South Korean crypto exchange Upbit listed POD, the token of Dolphin, on its Korean won, BTC and USDT markets at 4 p.m. KST on Oct. 2. In the first minute after trading opened, the price climbed from 523 won to 1,085 won. Dolphin is a decentralized AI network that pools idle graphics cards (GPUs) owned by individuals to share the work of generating answers from AI models, known as inference.

A five-minute buy freeze, then a double in one minute

Upbit published its listing notice at 1:37 p.m. KST on Oct. 2 and opened deposits and withdrawals first. The notice gave pre-listing reference prices of 419 won for the previous day's close and 428 won as of 1:20 p.m. on Oct. 2. For roughly five minutes after trading began, Upbit blocked buy orders and rejected sell orders priced more than 10% below the previous close. It also restricted all order types other than limit orders for about two hours.

When the buy restriction lifted at 4:05 p.m., the first trade went through at 523 won. Within that same minute the price reached 1,085 won before closing the minute at 1,000 won. POD ended Oct. 2 (on Upbit's 9 a.m. KST daily candle) at 755 won. On Oct. 3 it hit an intraday high of 1,131 won, a new post-listing peak, and traded at 996 won around 10:30 p.m. KST, about 2.4 times the 419-won previous close cited in the notice. POD's 24-hour trading value on Upbit's Korean won market was about 152.8 billion won.

Turning idle GPUs into AI answers

Dolphin is a team that has released fine-tuned versions of open AI models such as Meta's Llama, Mistral and Alibaba's Qwen. According to its official project page, it filters refusals and biased answers out of its training data as much as possible to build so-called "uncensored" models that do not refuse user requests. Dolphin said it built "Dolphin Mistral 24B Venice Edition" with AI service Venice, and that its models are downloaded more than 5 million times a month on Hugging Face.

The Dolphin network groups GPUs running the same model into a single pool and hands each incoming user request to whichever node is free at that moment. Dolphin calls this a "Peer-to-Pool" design. Node operators earn POD based on the number of requests they process, and validators check that other nodes are running the specified model correctly. Its web chat and Telegram bot run on the network.

All network revenue goes to buying back POD

"100% of revenue generated by the network is automatically used to buy back POD on the market," Dolphin said on its project page. The design is meant to offset the tokens released as node rewards with buybacks. Dolphin wrote that it operates as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) without an equity structure.

POD is used for staking and bonding (posting a deposit). Node operators who bond staked POD can raise their rewards by up to 1.3 times, and they can lose the bonded tokens if caught cheating. Becoming a validator requires bonding about three months' worth of earnings and at least 100,000 POD. Both staking and bonding carry a three-month cooldown before the tokens can be withdrawn.

Upbit accounts for 95% of trading

According to CoinGecko, POD has a maximum supply of 500 million tokens, of which about 83.61 million, or 17%, are currently in circulation. As of the night of Oct. 3, its market capitalization was about $62.4 million, and its fully diluted valuation (FDV), based on maximum supply, was about $373.16 million. Of the roughly $124 million in POD trading over the past 24 hours tracked by CoinGecko, $118.12 million, or about 95%, came from Upbit. The rest came from Uniswap, a decentralized exchange on the Base chain, and international exchanges including MEXC and LBank. POD is not listed on Bithumb or Binance.

Around 10:30 p.m. KST on Oct. 3, POD traded at $0.7464 on crypto exchange MEXC. Converted at Upbit's Tether (USDT) price of 1,360 won, that equals about 1,015 won, meaning Upbit's won price of 996 won was about 1.9% lower.