Lots and Consumption Window

On The Grid, purchased Units are grouped into Lots when they enter your Consumption Account. Each Lot has a 4-hour Use It or Lose It window: tokens not consumed within that window expire permanently. This perishability is a deliberate design choice - it gives suppliers confidence that demand is real and near-term, which lets them price aggressively, and it prevents capacity hoarding that would distort the market.

What are Lots?

When Units leave your Trading Account, either through a Scheduled Sweep or a voluntary transfer, they are grouped into Lots in your Consumption Account. Each Lot:

• Represents a specific quantity of Units.

• Has a fixed 4 hour expiry.

• Is consumed on a first in, first out (FIFO) basis. The system always spends from the Lot that expires soonest.

Why 4 hours?

The 4 hour window is a deliberate design choice:

• It gives suppliers strong certainty that any Units they sell will either be used quickly or expire, which lets them price more aggressively and predictably.

• It is long enough to cover typical interactive usage and near term batch jobs, including workloads scheduled around predictable troughs.

If a Lot reaches the end of its 4 hour window with leftover tokens, those tokens expire and are no longer usable or refundable. This use it or lose it rule is a core part of the market discipline.