OpenAI awards plaques to developers processing billions of tokens

At its DevDay 2025 conference in the U.S., OpenAI honored developers who had consumed extraordinary amounts of tokens on its platform, presenting them with commemorative coins.

The keepsakes, reminiscent of YouTube’s Creator Awards, come in different colors depending on token milestones:

• Silver — 10 billion tokens

• Black — 100 billion tokens

• Blue or Green — 1 trillion tokens

• Gold — 10 trillion tokens

Engraved with the names of those who crossed these thresholds, the coins were designed to give a physical presence to what is otherwise an abstract digital metric. OpenAI said the project was created to recognize the real-world impact made by its users.

Each coin arrived with a letter describing its design:

You are holding the result: anodized aluminum mounted in a frosted transparent resin designed to catch and diffuse the light, Illuminating this major moment and reflecting our bright future together.

The letter concludes by saying that it is a piece to display “with pride, bound to generate conversation.”

To underscore the scale, processing 10 billion tokens consumed as much electricity as it would take to charge one million smartphones, while one trillion tokens burned the equivalent of powering a single home for 300 years.