what it is
You can now ask a frontier-level AI model anything for around 9 sats, with no account. Your question gets encrypted on your own machine and only gets decrypted inside a sealed chip on the GPU that runs the model. The operator of the server couldn't read it if he tried. Routstr shipped this last week and I started testing the same day.
why it matters
Imagine typing your private thoughts into a company whose whole business is remembering them. That's normal AI today. The alternative was running a weak model on your own laptop and giving up the power. Routstr sits between the two - models close to the frontier, encrypted the whole way through, paid per question in sats so there is no account quietly collecting you. Bitcoin fixed this for money. Same play, this time for intelligence.
how to set it up
The fastest way to feel it: open chat.routstr.com, pick a model, pay a few sats, ask something. Two minutes.
The full setup, for using it in your own tools - open a terminal and paste these:
curl -fsSL https://bun.sh/install | bash
Open a new terminal window, then:
bun i -g routstrd
routstrd onboard
routstrd receive 6900
The last command shows a Lightning invoice for 6900 sats. Pay it from any Lightning wallet and you're live. Later, routstrd top shows what you've spent.
what you're trusting
The sealed chip comes from Nvidia and the software layer from a company called Tinfoil. Closed hardware, and chips like this have been broken before. You are trusting that chip, and you should know that you are. Routstr says this in their own announcement instead of burying it - exactly how it should be done. Their fallback if the chip ever breaks: no accounts and unlinkable payments means there's no profile of you to steal. Sounds right on paper, I want to see it hold in practice. Also know before you spend: only one server offers these models so far, and long coding sessions get pricey because caching discounts don't exist yet.
verdict
Testing now. My daily work runs through it. Verdict here when I'm done. If you can't wait, ask it something at chat.routstr.com and see for yourself. A few sats.