Following our mainnet 2 launch in March, this past summer was the first that we had a live, working product. Having a tangible product presented a whole new set of opportunities as well as learnings.
For the first time, developers were able to use and play with our software to deploy and host applications on Akash Network’s open-source, distributed peer-to-peer marketplace for cloud compute. As such, two of our main goals have been to drive growth and adoption of Akash Network, while supporting the evolution and architecture of the decentralized web (dWeb).
Through key partnerships, new listings, our global community, bounties, and new product features, we’ve seen the number of active deployments more than triple from 150 to 465 and a rapid increase in Akash Token (AKT) spend; positioning Akash to best support the future of the Internet.
Partnerships
In May, just after the launch of our platform, we were selected to support the Helium Network, the largest peer-to-peer wireless internet-of-things (IoT) network by providing decentralized cloud compute for their new blockchain validators.
Last month, through an integration with Skynet and a key partnership with Filebase, we took major leaps forward when it comes to supporting the development of dWeb, making it easier for developers to build and host decentralized apps. By bringing together compute and storage layers, developers can now host their applications on a fully decentralized cloud.
“The Filebase API is S3 compatible, which allows developers to seamlessly leverage multiple decentralized storage networks for the first time. We’re excited to pair our S3 compatible access layer to decentralized storage networks, with the power and flexibility of Akash Network. We can’t wait to see what our ecosystem builds through the pairing of dWeb compute and multi-cloud storage as one.”
Joshua Noble, CEO, and Co-founder of Filebase
More recently, we began working with mining communities such as pkt.cash, the world’s first bandwidth-hard blockchain. Mining cryptocurrency on the cloud is much easier than building your own hardware. Cloud hosting usually comes at a higher cost and requires contracts, and service providers can charge extra fees for bandwidth usage. Making things more difficult, some cloud providers are shutting off mining operations at will. Crypto-mining projects like PKT, are looking for better cloud providers and now they can run on Akash Network.
Check out the video below to see this in action.
Listings
AKT is now on a total of 8 exchanges. This past quarter we announced listings on BHEX and Bittrex Global and are seeing an influx of decentralized exchanges (DEX) appear on the market that allows for fewer regulatory restrictions, lower transactions fees, and higher incentives.
Decentralized Exchanges
Our first DEX listing was Osmosis, an automated market maker (AMM) protocol built for liquidity providers, allowing users to earn rewards for providing liquidity. Users are now able to pair the Cosmos native coin, atom (ATOM), one of the most widely available tokens in the world, to AKT, significantly increasing access to our native token. This enables ATOM holders with the ability to swap their ATOM for AKT, increasing the incentives to buy and hold AKT by incentivizing liquidity pools with OSMO tokens for offering their AKT to the pool.
Hosted on Akash, Osmosis was a huge success with over $100-million in Total Locked Value in its first month.
“We’re excited to have Akash Network be one of the first launch partners of Osmosis. Akash Network enables a new generation of resilient, decentralized Internet infrastructure to be built, and Osmosis provides a gateway for anyone to take part in this decentralized economy. For Osmosis to be a truly decentralized exchange, we need to be built on a decentralized infrastructure. Osmosis will be a proud user of Akash infrastructure to host our applications and API-serving nodes.”
Sunny Aggarwal, Co-founder of Osmosis
Announced earlier this month, AKT is now supported on a second decentralized exchange, Emeris, a portal to cross-chain DeFi. As one of the first tokens available on Emeris, users can now swap, transfer, pool and manage AKT across multiple chains. Emeris saw four million in Total Locked Value in less than a week.
AKT Liquidity on Cosmos cross-chain DEXs’ has increased significantly in the past couple of months and, this is just the beginning.
Community
Our community is growing fast with over 80,000 members distributed all over the world. From the United States to Russia, China and Korea, we’d like to thank everyone who has supported us along the way.
The Akash Community Forum
The Akash Community Forum is our version of Stack Overflow. It’s designed to help developers receive community support and share their technical expertise. Since our relaunch of the Forum, growth in membership has been incredible. We now have topics of conversation including validators, providers, miners, hackathons, bounties, and are seeing our community members interacting with one another and answering each other’s questions.
If you have been looking to find or provide community support check out the Akash Community Forum here.
Akash is Global
We’ve launched a few new global channels where our Chinese and Russian-speaking community members can connect with each other to receive updates about Akash.
To connect with our Chinese community, check out Bihu Coinbar, Weibo and QQ Group. To connect with our Russian community members, check out our Twitter and VK.
Akash Insiders
We’ve been busy onboarding a leadership community of 24 (and growing) developers, event organizers and creators to provide support and develop educational content for customers, developers, providers, and partners. The goal of the Insiders program is to support Akash advocates and provide opportunities for personal and professional growth. If you’re interested in participating, apply today.
Developer Grants Program
To drive the development of open-source projects and support the evolution of the dWeb, we launched the Developer Grant Program, a community-driven source of funding for promising developers and teams.
Offering grants up to $100,000 in AKT, the Grant Program has already awarded over 100 developers in our first batch.
Hackathons, Challenges and Bounties
Solana Season Hackathon
To progress our integration with Solana, we joined the Solana Season Hackathon, and presented a total of 4 challenges with a $15,000 AKT prize pot.
In first place, with a $10,000 prize (2,500 AKT) was the Akash Deploy UI created by Tom Beynon and submitted by newsystem090 with a key improvement, Keplr wallet integration.
“The Akash Deploy UI makes it easier to manage multiple deployments on Akash in one place, your web browser.”
Tom Beynon
Click here to see all of the great project submissions.
Sovrython, Powered by Gitcoin
The Sovrython was a 6-week long hackathon that invited developers from all chains to collaborate on decentralization/privacy, data science, integrations, and finance with a shared goal to accelerate the future of DeFi.
We committed $100,000 in $AKT to the winners of our three challenges which asked developers to:
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Securely deploy the Sovryn node using Akash Network
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Design an easy-to-use UI to help developers deploy any app on Akash
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Build an app that leverages decentralized storage such as Skynet and run it on Akash
From a decentralized container registry to an app that allows influencers to easily gift NFTs to their fans, we saw a lot of great projects. Click here to see all submissions.
Skynet
Following our integration with Skynet Labs to provide the first full-stack dWeb solution to handle backup, restore, and migration, we hosted a challenge, offering $10,000 to the developer or team that builds the best app that integrates Skynet and Akash.
Our first-place winner was SkyChat, a decentralized version of Discord. SkyChat uses MySky to let users login in a permissionless and decentralized way. With MySky, every user fully owns their key pair, which is the root of their decentralized identity.
To read more about how SkyChat works click here.
Filebase
Launched just last week, we are currently running a Filebase challenge. With $10,000 in $AKT and $250 in free object storage, we’re challenging our community to build the best app that integrates Filebase and Akash.
Click here if you’d like to get involved.
Product
Our core dev team has been hyper-focused on stabilizing the provider services and improving the deployment experience. Taking feedback from our users and working directly with the community, the core dev team made a few big feature updates, some small bug fixes, and launched developer tooling that allows non-technical users to deploy in 2 minutes or less.
Feature Updates
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Update #1231: Enables Akash Network to support Apple’s M1. See more, here.
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Update #1232: Provides prometheus metrics to the provider so they can get insights into how their Kubernetes cluster is running. See more, here.
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Update #1251: Allows hostname dash and SDL which allows people to use hyphens in their domains - something our community is very excited about! See more, here.
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Update #1265: Eliminates resource leaks causing out of memory. See more, here.
Developer Tooling
Launched by one of our developer partners, Maxime, the Akashlytics Deploy tool is a desktop app for Windows and Mac with an easy-to-use GUI for defining and deploying apps on Akash. Non-technical users are now deploying apps like WordPress and Minecraft on Akash in roughly 2 minutes.
Coming Soon
The Faucet App — think AWS credits. A project led by our Engineering lead, Derek Anderson, the Faucet app is designed to help distribute AKT and ease developer onboarding. The Faucet will distribute enough AKT for one free deployment so devs who are new to our ecosystem can try deploying on Akash.
Next up is a brand new command-line interface (CLI). The new CLI, expected to launch at the end of mid-Fall, will be client-focused and project-based to help developers deploy, manage, and configure their applications.
What’s Next?
As we continue to improve the user experience on Akash Network and navigate the needs of our users, we are seeing accelerated growth in network usage and AKT spend.
Recently, we’ve even been running out of capacity due to the high demand, but don’t worry, this is something our core dev team is continuously working on to bring more on, and as quickly as possible! As we start to see what can be considered just the beginning of product-market fit, our surge in growth validates what our CEO, Greg Osuri, and CTO, Adam Bozanich have been developing for more than five years.
Respectively, as pointed out by Ellio Trades, people are starting to realize the potential of the Cosmos ecosystem at large. Not only are we seeing the Cosmos Market Cap continue to grow but earlier this year we saw the launch of Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) which enables blockchain protocols to communicate and transact with each other independently. Next up: cross-chain composability. According to Cointelegraph, “this would mean users with almost any decentralized holdings could easily use it as collateral to get involved with Decentralized Applications, or DApps, across all networks.”
As Akash Network and the Cosmos ecosystem both continue to grow, we’re primed to become the leading provider for decentralized cloud computing. With 100 percent month-over-month growth and a goal of 10,000 deployments by the end of the year, we’re just getting started.
