1. Why a Routing Network Is Needed Now

AI application development is increasingly an operations problem, not a model selection problem.

Provider Dependency

Dependence on a single AI provider means provider outages become product outages. Policy changes, pricing updates, or regional restrictions immediately propagate to user-facing failures.

Quantified Risk: With 175+ AI provider incidents annually and average enterprise downtime costs of $35,000/hour, a single provider strategy exposes businesses to $500K+ in potential annual losses.

In Web3, this issue becomes existential. On-chain agents and automated protocols cannot pause when centralized APIs fail.

Opaque Performance and Cost

In centralized AI systems, it is difficult to verify how requests were processed, through which path, and at what actual cost. For on-chain systems, opacity is unacceptable—execution, cost, and contribution must be publicly verifiable.

Limited Participation

Today's AI infrastructure economy is dominated by a small number of centralized providers. Users consume. Providers control. Infrastructure contributors have little meaningful participation.

RouterLink transforms AI access into a networked, measurable, and verifiable protocol.