The physical GPU market has no exchange.
That slows the market. And it concentrates power.
Hyperscalers monopolise the supply chain. Neoclouds fight for what's left. And everyone else - enterprises building their own infrastructure, nations pursuing sovereign AI capability, data centres with stranded GPU assets - operates in a market with no structure and no neutral intermediary.
This company is positioning itself as the fix.
Who are they?
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What is Nodestream?
Nodestream is a multi-sided marketplace.
Not a GPU cloud. Not a broker. A transactional layer, handling identity, compliance, escrow, and settlement for high-value compute hardware deals, connecting:
Buyers: AI startups, enterprises, and sovereign cloud builders.
Sellers: Hardware resellers, data centres with idle GPU capacity, and OEMs.
Hosts: Regional colocators and enterprise data centres looking to fill racks and generate recurring revenue.
Blockware Solutions, founded in 2017 in Chicago, is the platform's developer. Blockware has sold over 400,000 ASIC miners and deployed hundreds of megawatts of hosting in the USA across Kentucky, Texas, Georgia, and other locations. The Blockware Marketplace launched in 2023 for turnkey ASIC trading. Nodestream applies the same transactional model to GPUs and HPC hardware.
What problem does Nodestream solve?
The global AI compute market is:
Opaque: There is no standardised way to compare GPU clusters across sellers, geographies, or hosting configurations. Buyers negotiate blind, deal by deal, with no benchmark and no transparency on what comparable hardware is trading elsewhere.
Low-trust: Every transaction requires bespoke diligence - verifying buyer identity, hardware provenance, end-use compliance, and beneficial ownership from scratch. For sovereign and export-controlled deals, that process alone can stall a transaction for weeks.
Slow: Large international hardware transactions move through wire transfers, legal review, and manual escrow. Cross-border deals that should close in days routinely take weeks because the financial rails aren’t built for this asset class.
Illiquid: GPU hardware depreciates fast and trades poorly. Sellers with idle assets have no efficient liquidation channel. Buyers can't resell verified hardware back into a trusted pool. Capital stays trapped.
Who runs Nodestream?
Mason Jappa - Founder & CEO. Former Lead Solution Engineer, Fusion Risk Management. Riot Platforms advisory board (2021-22). Managing Partner, M31 Capital.
Megan Brooks-Anderson - CSO. Former COO of Riot Platforms. 25 years in operations, risk management, and SOX compliance. Hardware procurement and M&A experience at a major public miner, Riot Platforms.
Justin Carlson - CPO. 15 years in product development. Previously served as VP of Product Development for Cloud Products & MSP at Innova Solutions and as Director of Product at Fusion Risk Management. Promoted February 2025.
Nicholas Dorion - Director of HPC & Communications. Deep experience in the public and private sectors.
James Stanton - VP of Growth. Former Director of Business Development, Foundry Digital, where he scaled Foundry USA Pool to $20M ARR. Joined June 2025.
What is Nodestream’s competitive edge?
Centralised verification: End-to-end identity verification. Beneficial ownership screening, end-use certification, corporate authority affidavits, and a hardware provenance registry (photos, serial numbers, condition reports, certifications). Buyers verify once and transact across every seller on the platform. A smart, tiered compliance framework maps provider jurisdictions to applicable buyer regions.
Two-track inventory: Turnkey hosted clusters sit in verified colocation facilities - powered, cooled, networked, monitored - with ownership transferring instantly and no shipping required. OTC bulk lots are sourced globally with standardised templates and are filterable by GPU type, cluster size, capacity, geography, and availability. Every listing carries verified specs, pricing, lead times, and condition data at the asset level. Anonymous buyer/seller profiles protect commercial sensitivity while exposing the metadata that matters (region, usage type, capacity).
AI-guided procurement: An integrated assistant helps buyers articulate their requirements and discover suitable inventory. It supports multiple input types, recommends options based on operational constraints and regional considerations, and streamlines compliance and review steps. Transactions can proceed through a self-service flow or escalate to human experts for more complex deal structuring, with built-in tools for quoting, acceptance, and buyer-seller communication.
Crypto-native escrow: Smart contract-backed escrow with settlement in BTC, USDC, USDT, or wire. Funds are held programmatically and released against agreed conditions - removing counterparty risk on transactions that can reach the multi-million-dollar range. For international buyers, this compresses settlement from weeks to minutes.
Turnkey hosting and managed services: Automated energy billing, hardware performance dashboards, and usage reconciliation. End-to-end technical support covering onboarding, deployment, monitoring, and incident resolution. Managed infrastructure tiers are available for buyers who want provisioning, updates, and optimisation handled entirely by the platform.
Equipment financing: Finance partnerships unlock equipment financing at 70-80% LTV, with structured capital products enabling owner-operators to acquire GPU infrastructure through loans and leasing. Hardware insurance is planned as a selectable checkout option.
No analyst coverage yet: Nodestream is pre-product. No named enterprise customers disclosed. The validation so far is Blockware's ASIC track record (400,000+ miners, ~$140M Riot acquisition) and the OTC deal flow the company says is "multi-million dollar", but hasn't quantified publicly.
How buyers engage
OTC (live now): White-glove transactions for large or complex deals. Human deal teams handle structuring, compliance, and settlement. Multi-million-dollar transactions closing globally, per company statements.
Self-service marketplace (H1-H2 2026): Online KYC, quote request, digital signature, order tracking. Turnkey hosted inventory with agentic AI search and online checkout.
Platform services (roadmap): Financing, insurance, hosting RFQ, GPU monetisation layer, tokenisation. Each layers on the same verification and escrow infrastructure.
Recent moves
May 2025 - Stanton joins as VP of Growth. Nodestream marketplace publicly announced.
February 2025 - Leadership expansion. Carlson promoted to CPO. Dorion joins as Director of HPC & Communications. OTC operations begin.
What’s next for Nodestream?
Nodestream’s bet is that GPU ownership will matter more, not less.
Sovereign buyers, enterprise infrastructure teams, and regional cloud providers will increasingly prefer, and in many cases be incentivised by nation states, to own hardware rather than rent it. The markets where this hardware is bought and sold will require the same trust infrastructure long standard in financial markets. That means verified counterparties, standardised listings, programmatic escrow, and a liquid secondary market.
That layer does not yet exist.
Nodestream aims to build it.
Beyond the platform, the stated vision goes further: turn compute and energy into a global, liquid financial asset class. That means moving beyond hardware into fundamentally new areas. Financing. Insurance. A data centre hosting RFQ system. A GPU monetisation layer, and eventually, tokenisation.
All working together, with each product leveraging the same verification and escrow infrastructure that the marketplace is proving out now.
The risk is timing and execution.
OTC is live and generating revenue, and the self-service marketplace is targeting an H2 2026 release. Everything else is roadmap. Blockware's track record in ASIC marketplaces is real - 400,000+ miners sold, a $140M acquisition by Riot - but GPUs are a different market, a different compliance surface, and a different deal size.
Bitcoin miners optimise for hash rate and energy cost.
GPU buyers optimise for memory bandwidth, interconnect topology, and inference latency.
The procurement conversation is different. The diligence is different. The counterparties are different.
Right now, the market is so inefficient that the need for the product is clear.
The competitive question is whether the market gets built by a crypto-native ASIC operator pivoting into AI infrastructure, or by someone with deeper roots in the GPU stack.
Brokers already handle introductions. Neoclouds already rent capacity. OEMs already sell hardware. None of them has built the verification and settlement layer that makes a real secondary market.
Nodestream is betting that whoever builds that layer first owns the market.
The next twelve months will answer whether they're right.
If OTC deal flow scales and the self-service platform ships on time, Nodestream will have built something no one else has: a neutral, compliant, crypto-native exchange for physical AI compute. If it doesn't, the market will remain fragmented, and someone else will eventually try.
Sovereign compute needs a settlement layer. The hyperscalers aren't building it. The neoclouds aren't building it. The brokers aren't building it. That means the gap is real.
The question is whether Nodestream can close it first, and whether first is fast enough.