[AMA Recap] Akash Network (AKT)

On December 7, 2020, to better help BitMart users know more about Akash Network and its team, we held a Telegram AMA with the topic of “Akash Network”. We are pleased to have Greg Osuri, CEO of Akash, to join the AMA and share valuable insights with our community members.

If you missed the AMA live, check our AMA recap below for more details:

[AMA]

BitMart Admin:

Q1. Can you please introduce Akash, its team, and its vision?

Greg:

My name is Greg Osuri, and I'm a globally recognized open source developer, and have authored open-source libraries adopted by organizations including Ubuntu, HashiCorp, and Kubernetes. Our team has a legacy of successfully implementing developer-focused and SaaS go-to-market strategies that scale and we decided to tackle the problem directly.

We wanted to create an alternative to the pricing inefficiency, inflexibility, and anti-competitive practices of centralized cloud services providers (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Alibaba Cloud) that dominate 71% market share of what's projected to be a $370B market by 2023.

With limited options for developers/organizations, we envisioned a world where cloud computing is permissionless, sovereign, and open, where developers and organizations can have greater freedom, flexibility, and sovereignty to create and grow, becoming truly unstoppable.

We built a decentralized cloud marketplace that would serve broader use cases that will work with existing tech stacks, and provide high-growth organizations with much needed scalability and price advantages. Unlike other decentralized cloud platforms, Akash Network supports broad use cases and generic compute – any cloud-native applications running on the cloud today (AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure or Alibaba Cloud), can run on Akash.

BitMart Admin:

Q2. How does "DeCloud" - Decentralized Cloud Computing work and what does it mean for DeFi applications?

Greg:

Akash will be a faster, more efficient, and lower cost cloud built for DeFi, decentralized projects, and high growth companies, that will be providing scale, flexibility, and price performance. Our platform is compatible with cloud-native applications that run on the cloud - if it runs on the cloud today, it can run on Akash.

DeFi stakeholders (Traders, Protocol Developer, and Validators) face challenges and risks including:

a) Censorship Risk
b) Prohibitive Costs
c) Scalability Challenges

A rising trend with the DeFi boom is Stateless (such as Uniswap or Aave) interfaces. These interfaces improve user experience exponentially while ensuring sovereignty, but risk censorship as they are hosted on a centralized cloud provider with a DNS name. Currently, DeFi development is very expensive for example a full Ethereum node alone costs $25,000. This is passed back on to the users as Gas Fees.

Akash DeCloud will accelerate DeFi:

Unstoppable DeFi: Cloud applications hosted on Akash are censorship resistant, meaning the applications can be controlled only by the owner of the key-pair.
Lower Costs: Leveraging the 85% of underutilized cloud capacity in 8.4 million data centers, as well as a novel subsidy model, Akash’s pricing mechanism is projected to reduce cloud computing costs 3x and up to 10x in the future.
Increased Scalability: With Inter Blockchain Communication protocol, Akash is helping to bring about a scalability revolution in blockchains by enabling independent chains to exchange value with their native tokens.

The future of DeFi Development is censorship-resistant, non-custodial and unstoppable.

BitMart Admin:

Q3. Can you elaborate a bit more on the Supermini product, how it works, and what it provides?

Greg:

The Supermini is a powerful portable supercomputer for the home that allows anyone to plug in and earn income (with future multi-currency settlement) by offering its unused compute on Akash’s cloud computing marketplace. It will be able to be used by anyone, even non technical users, and requires no additional equipment.

With the Supermini, our aim is for users to run a machine learning workload or deploy applications, and own a private cloud for full control over your data. Our goal for the Supermini is to achieve good distribution of Akash nodes in a low powered yet resilient home setting.

In June of this year, we sold through the first pre-orders of our Supermini within three weeks. You can learn more about the Supermini here: https://akash.network/supermini/.

BitMart Admin:

Q4. What are some of the major competitors in the space, and how do you see your competitive advantage among your peers?

Greg:

The cloud computing industry is dominated by four centralized cloud service providers (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Alibaba Cloud). With the CSPs, services are inflexible and come at a high cost.

We're different from CSPs for the following reasons:

- Efficient: on Akash, you pay for what you need, when you need it. You can sell excess capacity you are not using

- Flexible & Scalable: Easy to adopt (built for mainstream) and compatible with existing cloud applications and a company's tech stack. No vendor lock-ins

- Price Advantage: Up to 10X less than market offerings (future economics 2.0 in 2021)

Unlike other decentralized cloud platforms like Dfinity or Golem, Akash supports cloud-native applications today - if it's running on the cloud, it'll run on Akash.

BitMart Admin:

Q5. Can you describe the native token, AKT, and provide some context on its token economics and utilities?

Greg:

Akash Network is a sovereign proof-of-stake chain built on Cosmos SDK, that leverages Akash Token (AKT), a native utility token, for the primary means to govern, secure the blockchain, and provide a default mechanism to store and exchange value in our compute marketplace.

Our framework bootstrap early supply by subsidizing using inflation (i.e., borrowing from the future). We created a model to activate an incentive structure that not only fairly distributes but will unlock network effects to accelerate growth. With AKT, we create subsidies by borrowing from the future to create the effects of liquidity at an agreeable price point. These subsidies nurture continued network growth and lead to more liquidity, which further accelerates growth.

For better context, I highly recommend you check out these resources:

- https://akash.network/blog/bootstrapping-a-free-market-by-borrowing-from-the-future

- https://akash.network/blog/an-evolution-of-akash-network-token-economics

For deeper insights, see our economics paper: https://akash-web-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/03/akash-econ.pdf

BitMart Admin:

Q6.Can you describe Akash mainnet statistics, particularly the number of validators, staked ratios, and staking yields?

Greg:

Our Mainnet went live with 64 active validators — none of whom are run by Akash

- The network recently surpassed 1,000,000 blocks

- We currently have a bonded rate of approximately 87.3%.

- Staking yields can fluctuate, but we're currently at a yield of 51.89%.

For realtime information on staking yield, please check out Staking Rewards page for Akash https://www.stakingrewards.com/earn/akash/providers.

BitMart Admin:

Q7.How do you envision Akash being leveraged by crypto devs?

Greg:

Well crypto developers need to run servers. For testnets for frontends, etc... We have a lot of interest from projects looking to run large numbers of nodes for testnets. We also have a lot of interest for front ends for DeFi applications.

Workloads running on Akash are Unstoppable, this is especially great for front-ends for decentralized apps and oracles.

BitMart Admin:

Q8. Why Blockchain? Can't you use a centralized database?

Greg:

We believe blockchain to be useful because it allows us to create a shared controlled environment that consolidates compute supply globally in a decentralized manner.

Because we’re a permissionless marketplace, you also need to institute trust and transparency within your ecosystem. When you factor in trust to support your ecosystem, it creates several advantages.

Now with blockchain, one of the advantages is you can design your token economic incentives to serve a particular purpose, and for us, it’s creating subsidies that exponentially reduces compute costs. Without blockchain, we can save developers 2-3X on their cloud bills. With our tokenomics, those savings can reach as high as 10X.

Cloud compute is a commodity - our objective is to provide affordable compute to anyone, anywhere in a safe, permissionless, transparent way that you are able to trust.

BitMart Admin:

Q9. Can you talk about your governance model? How will people get attracted towards it who are not from a technical background?

Greg:

We are built on the CosmosSDK, so there is native support for upgrade proposals and other basic governance features built around staked token voting.

Everyone now uses cloud computing and Akash is all about making cloud computing easier to use. As we begin to develop low code and no code solutions on top of Akash in the months after the platform launch you will see solutions for non-technical users.

BitMart Admin:

Q10. Why did Akash choose the Tendermint and Cosmos when it came to technical selection? What advantages does Cosmos have over other cross-chain protocols?

Greg:

Tendermint attracted us because of its flexibility as a library with a modular and pragmatic design. We chose to build on Tendermint because of its iteration speed and community momentum. As a Go library, it was a natural fit in our stack.

[Free Q&A]