Tokens are minted then consumed. You cannot trade them, by definition. What would it even mean to trade a token? You can maybe trade a voucher that allows you to then redeem it for some token generation (aka compute), but the tokens themselves don’t make sense to be tradeable. And because they aren’t fungible you cannot swap a token for another one, that’s just not what LLMs are

I think you are reading too much into the "fungible" term.

No one is talking about trading tokens.

The idea being that getting your tokens from Provider A is no different than Provider B, especially if they both offer the same model. You can change one value in a request to openrouter and suddenly be hitting a different provider but offering the same tokens, because they offer the same model and the same settings.