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Services, time & capacity
Labour, bandwidth, shipping space, electricity on standby — perishable and unstorable.
Capacity is the strangest thing to trade because it expires. An empty seat, an idle hour, an unused GPU, a ship sailing light — the value is gone the moment the moment passes. That perishability drives violent price behaviour: freight rates and electricity prices can move more in a day than gold does in a year.
This is also the oldest category. Before there was money there was labour swapped for labour, and modern barter networks are a direct descendant.
Electricity
The only major commodity that must be produced and consumed in the same instant, which is why its price can go negative on a…
No. 035Insurance & reinsurance risk
Risk itself, underwritten face to face in a London market that predates every exchange on this site and still works by broke…
No. 001Advertising inventory
Human attention, auctioned in the time it takes a page to load — the largest and fastest continuous auction market most peop…
No. 005Barter & mutual credit
Trading goods and skills directly, or through a local credit unit, without sterling ever being involved — the oldest arrange…
No. 009Cloud compute capacity
Server time sold by the second, with a spot market, a futures-like reservation market, and a GPU shortage that turned it int…
No. 028Freelance labour & time
The oldest tradeable thing there is, now listed, rated, escrowed and priced on global platforms like any other commodity.
No. 031Grid flexibility & demand response
Getting paid not to use electricity, or to switch on precisely when the system needs it — a market that turns a freezer into…
No. 055Shipping freight
The cost of moving a cargo across an ocean — a market with no storage, brutal cycles, and an index published daily from Lond…