It’s one of those days where Silicon Florist posts are reaffirming my faith in Portland. And in Portland’s effervescent humanity and empathy. (Ha! Like that’s not every single day…?) Especially when it comes to making the web and technology more accessible. And along those lines, here’s a Portland dream that just will not quit: you’ve got a computer sitting there, mostly idle, quietly burning electricity — and somewhere across town or the globe someone needs exactly that compute and can’t get it without renting it from some hyperscaling giant. So what if you could just lend it to them…? Like SETI@home of the days of yore…?
Back in 2011, a Portland Startup Weekend project called CPUsage chased precisely that — I described it at the time as “kind of like AirBnB or Second Porch for your latent processing power.” They built it into a going concern. And it was a genuinely lovely win-win sort of magnanimous idea. So much so that they made the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt.
Unfortunately, the CPUsage crew ran out of runway in 2014. Because this turns out to be a very, very hard thing to build. Which is exactly why I keep rooting for the next person who tries.
But it’s still an interesting problem.
That’s why, a decade after the CPUsage demise, I told you about CoCore, Devin Gaffney‘s “Airbnb for compute” — a co-operative cloud share where friends with spare compute lend it to friends who need it. Same fifteen-year-old Portland instinct, new decade. Devin called it the “galactic optimist-communist hypercloud where we all cooperate amongst ourselves to yeet margins from huge companies.”
Now that hypercloud has leveled up. CoCore has been rebuilt on the AT Protocol. (Yes, the same plumbing underneath that newish cool kids social network, Bluesky.)
So what does that actually mean…? Well, it means that you bring your own identity. You sign in with your Bluesky handle. And you can start publishing compute jobs to the network.
Requesters want compute done — an LLM inference, a render job, a training step. They sign in with their AT Protocol identity (Bluesky handle, normally) and publish
dev.cocore.compute.jobrecords on their own PDS.
Which is a fancy way of saying that the jobs live on your corner of the network, not locked inside CoCore’s box. And that’s kind of the whole point. It’s distributed computing. Like meshy stuff that’s note messy. Anyone, including some future competing exchange, could index those records and offer a different settlement model. No moat. No lock-in. On purpose.
Honestly, the part that makes this very very Portland, though…? The economics.
Compute gets traded through a mutual-credit token economy — where one token roughly equals one model token — and the design is rooted in honest-to-goodness cooperative economics. The Rochdale tradition. Patronage dividends. A treasury, weekly token refreshes, the whole co-op lineage. It’s not crypto cosplay. It’s the food co-op model, pointed at GPUs.
Is it a business…? Still isn’t entirely sure. (But that was always remains part of the charm with Portland startups.) And there are two new design posts laying out exactly how the thing works — one on the architecture, one on the token market. And they’re a genuinely fun read if you like watching someone think out loud about a friendlier cloud.
Fifteen years on, the dream persists. And honestly, the fact that it’s hard is the best argument for cheering on the folks stubborn enough to try it again — cooperatively, out loud, on open rails.
Got a Bluesky handle and some compute curiosity…? Go poke around the CoCore console and read the design posts. See if this is the hypercloud for you.
