Akash Network

What it does

Akash is a decentralised cloud computing marketplace built on a Cosmos SDKSDKSoftware Development Kit. A collection of code libraries, documentation, and tools that lets developers integrate a service into their applications without writing everything from scratch. SDKs are how projects become easy to build with.Like a plug-and-play kit for building furniture. You don't have to mill your own wood, forge your own screws, or design the joinery from scratch. The kit gives you pre-cut parts and instructions so you can assemble the thing in an afternoon.Read more → appchain. Providers list spare GPUGPUGraphics Processing Unit. Originally designed to render video game graphics, GPUs turned out to be exceptionally good at the massively parallel math that AI models need. Modern AI training and inference runs almost entirely on GPUs.Like a factory with 10,000 workers doing the same simple task in parallel, versus a CPU which is more like 10 workers each doing different complex tasks. AI training involves doing simple math a million times per second on a million numbers, which is exactly what the GPU factory is designed for.Read more →, CPU, memory and storage capacity. Tenants describe workloads in SDL (a YAML-based Stack Definition Language), submit deployment orders on-chain, and providers bid via reverse auction. Lowest qualifying bid wins. Workloads run in Kubernetes containers on provider hardware.

The chain handles order matching, escrow payments and provider attestationAttestationA cryptographic proof that a piece of code is running on a specific hardware enclave in an unmodified state. Attestation lets remote users verify that a service is genuinely running what it claims to be running.Like a tamper-evident seal on a medicine bottle. The seal itself doesn't make the medicine safe, but it gives you a way to verify that nobody opened the bottle and swapped the contents before you bought it.Read more →. Actual compute happens off-chain. GPU marketplace launched in September 2023 with NVIDIA support. AkashML managed inferenceInferenceRunning a trained AI model to produce an answer. Inference is what happens when you type a prompt into ChatGPT and get a response. The model takes your input, computes a best guess, and returns it.Like asking an expert for their opinion. The training was the decades they spent becoming an expert. The inference is the 30 seconds it takes them to answer your specific question.Read more → service followed, simplifying AI modelModelA trained neural network that takes inputs (text, images, audio) and produces outputs (more text, classifications, generated content). In DeAI the model is the thing that actually does the work.Like a very experienced apprentice who has spent years watching thousands of masters make furniture. They can't explain how they know when a joint is right, but they can make a chair that looks and functions like a Chippendale. The training is invisible. The output is what matters.Read more → deployment for tenants who don’t want to wrangle Kubernetes themselves.

Founded by Greg Osuri and Adam Bozanich through Overclock Labs, a Delaware-incorporated company (June 2015). Osuri founded AngelHack, a major hackathon organisation (160,000-plus developers per AngelHack’s site), and has over 10,000 GitHub contributions. He testified before the US Congress House Committee on AI energy in May 2025, one of the few decentralised cloud founders to do so. The team has grown to roughly 115 people. Mainnet has been running since September 2020, making Akash one of the longest-running decentralised cloud marketplaces in the space.

Value proposition

Cost. Akash compute runs 50-85% cheaper than AWS, GCP and Azure for comparable workloads. The reverse auction model drives prices down because providers compete for your deployment rather than you accepting a posted rate.

Permissionless supply is the structural differentiator. Anyone with qualifying hardware can become a provider. No approval process, no relationship required, no geographic restrictions. This is the opposite of how Render operates, where node operators need Foundation approval.

For the sovereignty thesis, the value is clear: you deploy containerised workloads on infrastructure that no single entity controls, pay with a self-custodial walletWalletSoftware that stores the private keys needed to control tokens on a blockchain. A wallet does not actually hold any tokens. The tokens live on the chain. The wallet holds the keys that prove you own them.Like the key to a safe deposit box. The key doesn't contain your valuables. The valuables sit in the bank's vault. The key is what proves you're allowed to open the box and take them.Read more →, and no platform collects data about what you are running. Venice uses Akash GPUs for its inference workloads. Morpheus routes compute through Akash providers. ElizaOS runs AI agents on the network. These are real customers generating real revenue, not testnet experiments.

The counter-narrative is scale. Akash has a small pool of active providers (see live count above) with a few hundred GPUs. AWS has millions. The “decentralised AWS” framing is aspirational. The reality is a functional but small marketplace that serves a specific niche: developers and projects that value permissionless deployment over managed services. GPU utilisation sits at roughly 60% (Akash’s own figure), which suggests credible demand but the absolute base is tiny. Provider count declined through 2025, despite usage growth. Homenode, launched in beta in February 2026, aims to reverse this by letting consumer hardware (RTX 4090/5090 minimum in Phase 1) participate, but adoption metrics are not yet available.

Tokenomics

AKT launched via IEO on BitMax (now AscendEX) in October 2020 at $0.38-$0.77 per tokenTokenA digital unit of value or access rights tracked on a blockchain. Tokens can represent ownership in a project, a right to use a service, a share of future revenue, or simply a tradable asset with no underlying claim.Like a physical poker chip a casino issues. The chip itself has no value. What makes it worth something is what it lets you do at the casino, what the casino has promised, and how much other people will pay you for it.Read more →. Total raise across all rounds: $4.1 million ($1.31 million seed from CrunchFund in 2017, $2 million private sale in 2019, roughly $800,000 IEO). By crypto standards, this is tiny, and that matters. Low funding means less VCVCVenture Capital. Private investors who fund projects at an early stage in exchange for equity or token allocations. VC rounds are typically pre-launch, at steep discounts to any future public price, with multi-year vesting.Like angel investors in a startup who buy shares before the company goes public. They take more risk because the company might fail, so they get a better price. Once the company IPOs they can sell, and the public market pays whatever price it thinks is fair.Read more → overhang, less misaligned incentive, and less pressure to juice metrics for investor returns.

Genesis supply was 100 million AKT. Long-term distribution of max supply:

• MiningProof of WorkThe original blockchain consensus mechanism where miners compete to solve computationally expensive puzzles. The winner proposes the next block and earns the rewards. Proof of Work secures Bitcoin and most pre-2020 chains.Like a lottery that runs every 10 minutes where the tickets cost electricity. Whoever spends the most electricity buying lottery tickets has the best chance of winning that round's prize. Nobody can fake the result because the proof of their work is verifiable by everyone.Read more → (block rewardsEmissionsNew tokens created and distributed by a blockchain protocol over time as rewards to validators, stakers, or miners. Emissions fund network security and participation at the cost of diluting existing holders.Like a company that pays employees partly in newly printed shares. Every year the total number of shares goes up, which means existing shareholders own a slightly smaller slice of the same company unless the company grows faster than the printing.Read more →): 70.94%
• Investors: 10.03% (1-year lock, graded release, fully vested)
• Team and advisors: 7.85% (1-year lock, graduated release, fully vested)
• Foundation: 5.72% (fully vested)
• Ecosystem: 2.32%
• Testnets: 1.45%
• Vendors and marketing: 1.16%
• Public sale (IEO): 0.52%

Current supply sits at roughly 290 million AKT against a genesis cap of 388.5 million. Circulating supplyCirculating SupplyThe number of tokens currently in circulation and tradeable on the open market. Differs from total supply (which includes locked or unvested tokens) and max supply (the upper limit, if there is one).Like the number of cars on the road today versus the number ever produced. Some are in showrooms, some in junkyards, some still at the factory. Only the ones on the road count toward what people are actually driving.Read more → is 283 million (74% of cap). All initial allocations are now fully vested. InflationInflationThe annual rate at which new tokens are created and added to the circulating supply. Most networks use inflation to pay validators, stakers, and infrastructure providers from freshly minted tokens rather than real revenue.Like a landlord who raises the rent every year. If your salary goes up at the same rate, you break even. If it doesn't, you get poorer without noticing, because the number on your payslip hasn't changed but the ground under it has shifted.Read more → runs at a maximum of 8% annually (reduced from the original schedule by Proposal 283 in March 2025), with a 50% community pool tax meaning half of all inflation goes to community-directed spending.

The tokenomics thesis hinges on BME (Burn-Mint EquilibriumBurn-Mint EquilibriumA tokenomics model where network fees burn tokens while new tokens are minted and paid to suppliers. The system tries to balance burns and mints so circulating supply stays roughly stable when usage scales.Like a business that spends a dollar of revenue for every dollar of wages it pays. Money flows in and out at the same rate, so the total cash in the company stays flat. The rate of flow tells you how big the business is.Read more →), which went live on 23 March 2026. AKT spent on compute gets burned and new AKT minted to providers. If compute spend exceeds inflation, the token becomes deflationary. On-chain data in the first week shows a 7-day average net burnBurnPermanently removing tokens from circulation by sending them to an address that no one controls. Burns reduce total supply, which (all else equal) makes each remaining token worth more of the network's value.Like a company buying back its own shares and shredding them. The company's total value stays the same, but each remaining share now represents a slightly bigger slice of that value.Read more → of roughly 5,500-6,200 AKT per day, with the BME vault holding approximately 380,000 AKT at a collateral ratio of around 2.4. At current usage (~$1.05 million annualised from Console APIAPIApplication Programming Interface. A structured way for one piece of software to talk to another. In DeAI, APIs let applications request inference from a model without running the model themselves.Like a waiter in a restaurant. You don't walk into the kitchen and cook your own meal. You tell the waiter what you want, they tell the kitchen, the kitchen cooks it, and the waiter brings it back. The API is the waiter.Read more → data), BME reduces effective inflation from 8% to roughly 7.1%. That’s a start, not a revolution. The gap between modest burn and meaningful deflation is the core investment question.

StakingStakingLocking up a cryptocurrency to help secure a blockchain network, usually in exchange for rewards. The locked tokens act as a security deposit that can be taken away if the staker misbehaves.Like putting down a large rental deposit for an apartment. You get the money back if you behave, you earn interest while it's locked, and the landlord takes it if you trash the place.Read more → yields roughly 7.3% APY nominal, which is approximately -0.7% to 0% real yield after accounting for 8% inflation and the 50% community pool tax. The 21-day unbonding period locks capital during volatile markets. Slashing risk exists: 5% for double-signing, 0.01% for prolonged downtime.

Starbonds, a $75 million securities offering (Reg A+ filing) announced in 2025, is the elephant in the room. This is a corporate fundraise by Overclock Labs. Terms are not yet fully public. Whatever the structure, it represents significant new capital flowing into the entity that controls the development roadmap, and introduces an opaque financial dimension alongside the transparent on-chain economics.

AKT is down 96% from the all-time high of $8.08 from April 2021. Listed on Coinbase, Kraken and KuCoin but notably absent from Binance, which limits Asian market liquidityLiquidityHow easily a token can be bought or sold without moving the price. High liquidity means you can enter or exit large positions quickly at the quoted price. Low liquidity means even small trades can swing the market.Like the difference between selling a house and selling a share of Apple stock. The house might be worth more on paper, but finding a buyer at that price takes weeks. The Apple share converts to cash in one click.Read more → and retail discovery. Grayscale added AKT to its AI Tools and Resources sector index in May 2025, and Coinbase included AKT in the Coinbase 50 Index in June 2025. See live data above for current pricing.

How to participate

Stake AKT. Delegate to validators on the Akash chain. Earn inflation rewards (~7.3% APY nominal, near zero real yield after inflation and community pool tax). Vote on governance proposals through your validatorValidatorA computer that runs the full blockchain protocol, verifies transactions, and proposes new blocks. Validators are the workers that keep a Proof of Stake network running, and they earn rewards for doing the work correctly.Like a notary public who witnesses and stamps legal documents. Validators witness transactions, check they follow the rules, and stamp them into the permanent record. A notary who commits fraud loses their license. Validators work the same way, except the license is staked tokens that get slashed on misbehaviour.Read more → or directly. Requires a Cosmos wallet (Keplr). Minimum stake is negligible. The main consideration is the 21-day unbonding period.

Provide compute. Run a provider node and list spare capacity on the marketplace. Permissionless, anyone with qualifying hardware can join. Requires server-grade hardware, Kubernetes administration skills, NVIDIA GPUs for GPU workloads, and reliable internet. This is the more interesting participation mode if you have idle hardware, but the technical barrier is real.

Deploy workloads. Use Akash as a tenant. Describe your workload in SDL, submit to the marketplace, and providers bid. Typically 50-85% cheaper than centralised cloud. Requires Docker/container knowledge and an AKT deposit for escrow. No managed services (databases, load balancers, CDN), just raw compute.

Build. Four funding mechanisms: Community Pool (on-chain treasury), Akash Accelerate (grants programme), Akash Bounties Board and AkashML partnerships. Go and Kubernetes expertise preferred.

Honest assessment

What works

Akash is the most credible decentralised cloud marketplace operating today. That’s a factual statement, not an endorsement.

Akash’s quarterly Messari reports show $3.15 million in annual revenue (up 128% year-over-year), with 3.1 million deployments created in 2025 (466% growth). Venice, ElizaOS, Morpheus and Gensyn are verifiable, named customers deploying real workloads. Not testnet experiments, not sponsored integrations. The permissionless provider model is structurally sound: anyone with qualifying hardware can join. Fully open source under Apache 2.0 across 65 repositories with 350-plus contributors.

Osuri’s background (AngelHack founder, congressional testimony on AI energy) gives the project genuine credibility, not just marketing credibility. Listed on Coinbase and Kraken. Cosmos-based on-chain governanceDAODecentralised Autonomous Organisation. A way to coordinate decisions and manage a treasury using token-weighted voting instead of a traditional company structure. Token holders propose and vote on changes directly.Like a shareholder-run company where every shareholder can vote on every decision, the votes are public, and the company can't do anything the shareholders don't approve. The coordination is messier than a normal company but nobody has unilateral control.Read more → with real participation: 300-plus proposals, and the community rejected Proposal #302 for lack of transparency, showing governance has actual teeth. Homenode (beta February 2026) could expand the provider base by making consumer hardware eligible.

What doesn’t work yet

The active provider count isn’t a cloud marketplace. It’s a pilot programme, and the count declined through 2025 despite usage growth. Provider concentration means a handful of large operators serve the majority of capacity. No managed services limits enterprise adoption to teams comfortable with raw compute. Revenue growth of 128% sounds impressive until you realise it went from $1.4 million to $3.15 million, which is not meaningful at infrastructure scale. GPU utilisation at 60% reflects verifiable demand but across only a few hundred GPUs, which is a rounding error against hyperscaler capacity.

The risk

Chain deprecation is the single highest-impact risk. Akash plans to deprecate its Cosmos chain in late 2026 and migrate to a new chain, with Solana mentioned as a “strong contender” but no governance vote conducted. Migrating an entire blockchain and marketplace is technically complex, operationally destabilising, and could fracture the community. There’s no published technical specification. This isn’t an upgrade. It’s a rebuild.

No formal protocol-level security audit has been disclosed despite the network operating since 2020. That’s five-plus years of production infrastructure without a commissioned security review. The ChainLight authentication bypass vulnerability discovered in May 2024 demonstrates the attack surface is real. A spam attack in March 2025 caused degraded performance, though the network recovered.

Overclock Labs is a US-incorporated entity (Delaware), exposing the project to SEC, CFTC and compute export regulations. Osuri is the key person risk. He’s the public face, strategic driver and open-source credibility anchor. The Starbonds offering introduces new dilution and regulatory dimensions that aren’t yet fully transparent.

My position

I hold AKT. I also have indirect exposure through Venice (which uses Akash GPUs) and Morpheus (which routes compute through Akash providers). The chain migration introduces uncertainty but I believe the project’s technical credibility and real revenue justify the position.

Freedom Score: 66/100

Akash scores 66/100 (C grade). Full methodology at Freedom Score Methodology.

Infrastructure decentralisation (12/20): Active validators and provider counts are tracked live in the metrics above. Permissionless provider onboarding with GPUs across independent providers. Geographic distribution is real. But the provider count is objectively thin and declined through 2025. Starcluster/Starbonds introduces centralisation via enterprise datacentres with “vetted Nodekeepers”. Homenode (Feb 2026 beta) is a decentralising force but too new to measure.

Governance decentralisation (13/20): 300+ on-chain governance proposals with active participation. Proposal #308 had 42.31% turnout, exceeding 33.4% quorum. Community rejected Proposal #302 for lack of transparency, which shows governance has real teeth. 50% community pool tax funds community-directed spending. But Overclock Labs drives the strategic roadmap. Chain migration was announced by the founder, not governance-voted.

Token distribution fairness (8/15): Genesis was insider-heavy (34.5% investors, 27% team) but long-term allocation is better: 70.94% of max supply goes to mining/blockBlockA batch of transactions added to a blockchain at a set interval. Each block cryptographically links to the previous one, creating an append-only chain that can't be rewritten without redoing all the work since.Like a page in a ledger. Every page has a fixed number of entries, every page references the previous page, and once a page is filled and signed off it can't be edited without visibly invalidating every page that came after. The chain is just a very long series of these sealed pages.Read more → rewards. All tokens now fully vested. Total raise was modest by any standard ($4.1M). Not a fair launchFair LaunchA token launch where everyone has the same access from day one. No private sale, no insider allocation, no VC discount. Tokens are distributed by mining, staking, or open public sale at a single price.Like a 100m sprint where everyone starts behind the same line at the same time. Some runners are faster, but nobody gets to start 10 metres ahead because they paid extra. The race is decided by the run, not by who bought the best position.Read more →, but the small raise and majority mining allocation are above average.

Censorship resistance (10/15): Permissionless provider and tenant participation. No KYC required. Reverse auction is on-chain and transparent. But Starcluster introduces “vetted Nodekeepers” as a potential censorship vector. Overclock Labs is US-incorporated (Delaware) and subject to regulatory pressure. Spam attack (March 2025) demonstrated the network can be degraded temporarily.

Data sovereignty (10/15): Tenants fully control deployment configurations and data. Self-custodial Cosmos wallets. No central data collection by the protocol. Homenode lets users control their own hardware. But providers physically host workloads and could theoretically inspect containers. No encryption at the compute layer. ChainLight vulnerability (patched) showed potential for unauthorised deployment access.

Open source and transparency (13/15): Fully open source under Apache 2.0 across 65 repositories. Active development with real commits (Mainnet 16 in March 2026 shipped WASM smart contracts and BME activation). All governance proposals public on GitHub. Quarterly Messari reports and internal blog provide regular transparency. Near-exemplary. But no formal security audit despite five-plus years of operation. Overclock Labs’ corporate financials not public. Starbonds introduces an opaque financial dimension.

Path to improvement

Three changes would materially increase Akash’s score:

1. Commission a formal security audit. Five years of production infrastructure without a third-party security review is indefensible. The ChainLight vulnerability proved the attack surface exists. An audit by a credible firm would address the most obvious gap in Akash’s otherwise strong transparency position.
2. Execute the chain migration transparently. Publish a technical specification. Run a governance vote on the destination chain. Provide a detailed migration timeline with milestones. The current state, aspirational timelines with no published roadmap, creates justified uncertainty.
3. Grow the provider count. The current provider count, declining through 2025, isn’t decentralised cloud. Homenode is a step in the right direction. The target should be hundreds of active providers across multiple geographies before claiming the “decentralised AWS” positioning with a straight face.

Returns Score: 68/100

AKT scores 68/100 (C grade). Full methodology at Returns Score Methodology.

Token utility (16/20): AKT serves three clear functions: payment for compute on the marketplace, staking for validator security and governance, and a requirement for running validator infrastructure. Tenants pay in AKT (or USDC, with AKT settlement), and validators must bond AKT to participate. The utility is genuine and structurally necessary. The network can’t function without the token. The gap to a perfect score is the lack of a broader demand sink beyond compute settlement and staking.

Value accrual (14/20): BME went live on 23 March 2026, and the numbers are now on-chain rather than theoretical. The vault holds roughly 380,000 AKT at a collateral ratio of around 2.4, with a 7-day average net burn of 5,500-6,200 AKT per day. That’s a functioning burn mechanism tied to real revenue. The take rate on compute fees still generates modest income relative to market cap, and staking yields roughly 7.3% nominal (approximately zero real yield after 8% inflation and the 50% community pool tax). But the “coming soon” qualifier is gone. BME is live and burning. The gap to a higher score is scale: current burns offset only a fraction of inflation.

Supply dynamics (14/20): AKT has no hard cap and runs 8% nominal annual inflation. The supply is uncapped: the 388.5 million genesis cap isn’t a ceiling but a starting point, and inflation mints new tokens beyond it indefinitely. BME activated on 23 March 2026 and is now burning AKT on-chain. At current usage levels, effective inflation drops from 8% to roughly 7.1%. Not deflationary, but no longer purely inflationary either. All initial investor and team allocations are fully vested, which removes cliff-dump risk, but the ongoing dilution from staking rewards is real. The 50% community pool tax redirects half of inflation to community spending, which is good governance but does not reduce supply pressure. The token remains inflationary at current adoption levels. Meaningful deflation requires a substantial increase in compute revenue.

Revenue sustainability (14/25): This is Akash’s strongest returns dimension relative to the field. $3.15 million in annual revenue from real customers (Venice, ElizaOS, Morpheus, Gensyn) running real workloads is more than most DeAIDeAIDecentralised AI. An umbrella term for blockchain-based projects that build AI infrastructure (compute, data, inference, models, agents) without a single central provider controlling the system.Like the difference between streaming a movie from Netflix and sharing it via BitTorrent. Netflix is fast and polished but one company controls what you can watch and what you pay. BitTorrent is messier but no single operator can shut you out.Read more → projects can claim. Revenue grew 128% year-over-year. The marketplace has demonstrable product-market fit for permissionless cloud compute at discount prices. The concern is absolute scale: $3.15 million wouldn’t register as a rounding error at AWS. The revenue is real but tiny, and the revenue-to-emission ratio sits below 0.5 (roughly $3.15 million revenue against ~$7 million in annual inflation-driven dilution). The gap between “working product” and “sustainable economy” remains wide.

Liquidity and access (10/15): AKT is listed on Coinbase and Kraken, which provides reasonable access for Western retail and institutional buyers. Volume is adequate for moderate position sizes without excessive slippageSlippageThe difference between the expected price of a trade and the price you actually get when the trade executes. Slippage usually goes against the trader and gets worse with bigger trades or thinner markets.Like trying to buy 1000 bananas at the corner shop. The first few are at the marked price, but by the time you've bought them all you've moved the price up because there are no more bananas left at the original level. The shop has to restock at higher cost.Read more →. The notable absence is Binance, the largest exchange by volume, which limits Asian market discovery and liquidity depth. DEXDEXDecentralised Exchange. A trading venue where token swaps happen entirely through smart contracts, with no central operator holding user funds. The largest DEXes are Uniswap, Aerodrome, Raydium, PancakeSwap, and Curve.Like a self-service vending machine that lets you swap one type of coin for another. The machine sets the exchange rate based on its current stock, anyone can deposit coins to refill it, and there's no clerk behind the counter.Read more → liquidity on Osmosis is moderate. Not thin enough to be a problem, not deep enough to be a strength.

Path to improvement

Three changes would materially increase Akash’s returns score:

1. Scale BME burn volume. BME is live (23 March 2026) and burning AKT on-chain. But at current usage, net burns reduce effective inflation from 8% to roughly 7.1%. The mechanism works. The question is whether compute revenue grows fast enough to make the burns meaningful. An order-of-magnitude increase in daily spend would start to shift the inflation equation materially.
2. Secure a Binance listing. The absence from the world’s largest exchange is a concrete liquidity constraint. Binance coverage would meaningfully increase daily volume, improve price discovery, and expand Akash’s visibility in Asian markets where much of the retail crypto activity occurs.
3. Scale revenue by an order of magnitude. At $3.15 million annual revenue, the revenue-to-emission ratio sits below 0.5: revenue doesn’t even cover the dilution from inflation. Growing revenue toward $30 million would make the BME burn mechanism economically meaningful and support a credible value accrual narrative.

Score change log