Tölt Strategies LLC, a leading regulatory strategy and compliance consulting firm, announced that it has played a key role in helping Touchmark Technologies, Inc. develop the necessary documentation and trading rules to support the platform's nationwide launch that took place on Friday. Touchmark is building the market infrastructure for AI's fastest-growing cost line – inference model compute capacity.
California-based Touchmark's trading platform now enables commercial providers and buyers to enter into forward contracts for the delivery of tokens representing inference model compute capacity for the purpose of consuming the capacity in connection with the buyers' commercial operations.
By planning ahead for months where an end user expects to spend money on AI inference capacity, it can manage its budget more efficiently without being subject to excess capacity in the months where its needs are less significant. A producer can sell capacity forward, collecting payment now for a buyer's future usage.
Dorothy D. DeWitt, founder and CEO of Tölt Strategies and former Director of the Division of Market Oversight at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), said: "Tölt is all about helping clients smoothly navigate unchartered terrain, and we love helping them solve the regulatory, compliance and strategic challenges of novel concepts, markets and industries. We're seeing extraordinary interest in the development of GPU compute capacity and infrastructure, with established and startup companies reaching out regularly to request advice on how to innovate responsibly and quickly in these novel markets. The GPU compute and inference capacity markets have the potential to become as large as longstanding energy markets, and we are well-positioned to support companies in developing them. We are honored to serve as strategic advisors to Touchmark on this innovative forward market that addresses commercial consumption needs at discounts to spot prices, while enabling providers to collect proceeds for future production."
Touchmark Co-Founder and CEO Ilia Bolgov said: "The Tölt team understood our goals in launching a forward trading venue quickly and compliantly, allowing Touchmark to offer what we believe is the first trading venue matching buyers and sellers of AI inference capacity at forward prices that are discounted to the spot prices commercial buyers have been limited to."
Touchmark Co-Founder Roman Yanushevskyi said: "Tölt has been creative and responsive in advising on our trading platform's structure, consistent with our need for alacrity in launching. We look forward to continuing to work with Tölt as we grow and develop additional novel products that solve for challenges in the AI space."
"Tölt advised Touchmark on a go-to-market strategy that is not only compliant with trading and markets regulation but also flexible and scalable," DeWitt said.
