Nosana

What it does

Nosana is a decentralised 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.GPU in the glossary → marketplace on Solana, focused specifically on AI 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.Inference in the glossary → workloads. GPU owners (consumers, miners, data centres) monetise idle hardware by running Nosana Nodes. Developers and AI companies submit containerised inference jobs which are matched to suitable GPUs via Solana smart contracts.

Founded in Amsterdam in June 2021 by Jesse Eisses (MSc Artificial Intelligence, University of Amsterdam; former MLMLMachine Learning. The branch of AI where systems learn patterns from data instead of being explicitly programmed with rules. Modern AI (LLMs, image generation, recommendation systems) is almost entirely machine learning.Like teaching a child to recognise dogs by showing them thousands of pictures of dogs, instead of writing down a precise rulebook for what makes a dog. The child learns the pattern from examples rather than from instructions.ML in the glossary → Platform Architect at Intel) and Sjoerd Dijkstra (Senior DevOps Engineer at Zivver, University of Amsterdam). The project originally launched as a decentralised CI/CD platform for CPU computations and pivoted to GPU-based AI inference in October 2023.

Jobs are submitted via 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.API in the glossary →, CLI, 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.SDK in the glossary →, or web dashboard. The Nosana Grid matches supply with demand through on-chain smart contracts. The platform supports Docker containers, HuggingFace 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.Model in the glossary → loading, S3 resources, health checks, and confidential execution. Solana’s sub-second finality enables micro-payments and rapid job allocation.

Supported workloads include LLMLLMLarge Language Model. A neural network trained on vast amounts of text to predict the next word in a sequence. Modern LLMs (GPT, Claude, Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek) generate human-quality text and are the foundation of most modern AI products.Like an autocomplete that read every book ever written. It has no memory of individual texts but it has absorbed the patterns of language so deeply that it can generate paragraphs that sound human. The skill is statistical, not conscious.LLM in the glossary → inference (DeepSeek, TinyLlama, Ollama), Stable Diffusion image generation, LMDeploy and VLLM inference engines, Whisper speech-to-text, Jupyter notebooks, and arbitrary Docker containers.

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.Token in the glossary → launched 10 January 2022 via IDOIDOInitial DEX Offering. A token launch mechanism where the initial sale happens directly on a decentralised exchange, with built-in liquidity pool funding. IDOs replaced ICOs as the standard launch model for many projects after 2018.Like opening a new shop directly inside an existing market hall instead of running a separate sale event. The shop is open, the market provides foot traffic, and customers can walk in and trade from day one.IDO in the glossary → on Solanium at $0.10, followed by an IEO on Gate.io Startup. A private roundVCVenture 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.VC in the glossary → raised $1.36M at $0.08 per token. Total funding: $1.74M, making this one of the most modestly funded projects in the 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.DeAI in the glossary → space. Mainnet launched 14 January 2025 after a year-long closed beta.

Value proposition

Inference-specific GPU compute at up to 6x cost savings versus AWS, Azure, and GCP. That is the pitch, and it addresses a clear market gap.

Most decentralised compute projects try to be everything: trainingTrainingThe one-time process of teaching a neural network to perform a task by showing it massive amounts of example data and adjusting its internal weights until the outputs are good. Training builds the model; inference uses it.Like the years an apprentice spends learning a trade. You don't see any of the actual work, just thousands of repeated mistakes gradually becoming competence. By the end, the apprentice can do the job. The training was invisible, but the skill is now permanent.Training in the glossary →, inference, rendering, general compute. Nosana narrows the focus to inference only, which is the workload that scales with AI adoption. Every chatbot queryPromptThe text you give an AI model to tell it what to generate. A prompt can be a simple question, a long instruction, a chunk of context plus a task, or a conversation history the model uses to produce its response.Like a brief you give to a junior designer. A vague brief gets a vague result. A detailed brief with context, constraints, and examples gets something usable. The quality of the output depends heavily on the quality of the brief.Prompt in the glossary →, image generation, and voice transcription is an inference job. As AI moves from research to production, inference demand grows exponentially while training remains periodic.

The usage numbers are sizeable, and the marketplace settles on-chain. The Nosana Jobs program on Solana owns the marketplace accounts (confirmed via getAccountInfo), and Nosana’s live API reported 4,268,360 total jobs on 24 September 2026, a lifetime count the chain can’t confirm because completed job accounts are closed, with hundreds running concurrently at any moment. At our March 2026 review Nosana’s network figures showed 50,000 registered GPU hosts across 60+ countries, with approximately 4,200 active nodes and 600 daily active nodes. The Render Network integration (RNP-008, approved January 2025) allows Render nodes to execute Nosana jobs, expanding supply access. 14 named partnerships including PiKNiK (enterprise Nvidia A5000 infrastructure), Matrix One (AI avatars), Sogni.AI (Stable Diffusion), and Theoriq (AI agents).

The Solana Foundation backing adds credibility, and the team has relevant AI/ML backgrounds. Eisses’s Intel ML platform experience is directly applicable.

The counter-narrative is about magnitude rather than existence. The marketplace takes a per-job network fee on-chain (the rate is visible per market in Nosana’s /api/markets), so protocol revenue is real and measurable in principle. What’s missing is disclosure: Nosana publishes no USD figure for revenue per job, total fees, or protocol profits, and it isn’t on DeFiLlama.

The 6x cost savings claim implies low pricing per job, so even at over 4 million jobs the fee take could be modest. Without a disclosed figure you can’t size whether Nosana has found product-market fit or is giving away compute at unsustainable prices.

The 50,000 registered hosts versus 600 daily active nodes is a 98.8% idle rate. Most of that hardware is sitting unused. Whether that represents supply readiness (bullish: capacity is available when demand arrives) or ghost registrations (bearish: actual usable supply is much smaller) depends on your interpretation. If you want to run a node yourself, our Nosana node guide covers the setup and this demand reality in full.

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.Liquidity in the glossary → is dangerously thin. Under $1M across Raydium 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.DEX in the glossary → pools (GeckoTerminal, 24 September 2026). Kraken is the only tier-1 exchange listing it (NOS/USD and NOS/EUR), and trades there are small. Any significant position entry or exit will cause material 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.Slippage in the glossary →. This limits who can participate.

For the sovereignty thesis, Nosana offers permissionless GPU hosting; anyone can contribute hardware without KYC. Jobs are matched via smart contracts rather than centralised orchestration. Confidential execution is listed as a feature, though implementation details are sparse. The Solana dependency is a single-chain risk.

Against the other Solana GPU DePIN, Nosana trades size for transparency: see Nosana vs io.net.

Tokenomics

NOS has a maximum supply of 100 million tokens. All original vestingVestingA schedule that locks up tokens allocated to insiders, investors, and team members, releasing them gradually over months or years. Vesting prevents insiders from dumping on public buyers immediately after launch.Like a new employee's stock options at a startup. You don't get all the shares on day one. They unlock over four years so you stick around and do the work rather than cashing out and leaving.Vesting in the glossary → schedules completed in 2025, with the supply now fully circulated. There’s no ongoing dilution pressure from insiders.

Distribution was heavily insider-weighted: Team (20%) + Company (25%) = 45% insider allocation. Backers received 17% with 10% TGETGEToken Generation Event. The moment a project's token first becomes tradeable. TGE is when vesting clocks usually start, when liquidity hits exchanges, and when public price discovery begins.Like the IPO day for a startup. Everything that happened before TGE was private valuations and paper agreements. Everything after is the public market deciding what the thing is worth in real time.TGE in the glossary → and 9-month linear vesting. 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.Proof of Work in the glossary → allocation was 20% over 24 months. Liquidity received 10% at TGE. Only 3% was sold in the public IDO/IEO and 5% via airdropAirdropDistributing tokens for free to eligible wallets, usually to reward early users, bootstrap a community, or decentralise token ownership away from a small group of insiders at launch.Like a supermarket handing out free samples to people who already shop there. The samples cost the supermarket nothing to print. The goal is to convert casual shoppers into loyal customers by giving them something tangible to talk about.Airdrop in the glossary →, just 8% initial public distribution.

The private round raised $1.36M at $0.08 per NOS (17M tokens). The IDO raised $300K at $0.10 (3M tokens on Solanium). The IEO raised $80K at $0.10 (800K tokens on Gate.io Startup). Total raised: $1.74M. The token peaked at $7.83 in March 2024 and was about 95% below that ATHATHAll-Time High. The highest price a token has ever reached. ATH is usually quoted as a reference point for how far the current price has fallen (or risen) since the peak.Like the record lap time on a racetrack. It tells you what the car has been capable of at its absolute best, not what it will do today. Whether that record gets broken again depends on conditions that may or may not come back.ATH in the glossary → on 24 September 2026, though still above the $0.08 and $0.10 round prices.

NOS is used for GPU compute job payments, 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.Staking in the glossary → (xNOS score determines fee share), governance voting via NNP proposals, and a buyback-and-burn mechanism where 20% of protocol profits are used to repurchase and permanently remove NOS from circulation.

With supply fully circulated, the FDVFDVFully Diluted Valuation. The market cap a token would have if every token that will ever exist were already in circulation. FDV is what the project would be worth if all locked, vesting, or unminted tokens were trading today.Like valuing a startup based on what every share would be worth if all the unvested employee options had already been exercised. The number is bigger and uglier than the official market cap, but it tells you the true ceiling.FDV in the glossary →/MCap ratio is effectively 1:1. NNP-0001 (voted November 2025) proposes shifting rewards from passive yield to usage-based emissionsEmissionsNew 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.Emissions in the glossary → tied to network activity. If implemented, this could introduce 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.Inflation in the glossary → beyond the original 100M cap, fundamentally changing supply dynamics.

Listed on Kraken (NOSUSD and NOSEUR), Gate.io, MEXC, Raydium and Jupiter. No Binance or Coinbase. See live data above for current pricing.

Staking: Nosana’s stats endpoint reported 14,189 stakers and about 11.5M NOS staked on 24 September 2026, and neither figure matches any population the staking program exposes on-chain. APY has been halved since May 2024 and isn’t publicly disclosed.

How to participate

Run a Nosana Node. Contribute your GPU to the network. No KYC required. Install Nosana software, configure your hardware, start hosting inference jobs. Earn NOS from compute fees. Consumer and enterprise GPUs accepted. Technical skill: intermediate.

Stake NOS. Stake to earn xNOS score, which determines your share of transaction fees. Higher xNOS = larger fee portion. Technical skill: basic.

Deploy AI workloads. Submit inference jobs via API, CLI, SDK, or web dashboard. Load HuggingFace models directly. Docker container support. Technical skill: intermediate to advanced.

Honest assessment

Freedom Score: 58/100

Nosana has verifiable permissionless infrastructure with wide geographic distribution, but governance centralisation and audit gaps exist.

Infrastructure Decentralisation: 14/20. 4,200+ nodes across 60+ countries with permissionless GPU hosting. 50,000 registered hosts but only ~600 daily active nodes. Consumer and enterprise GPUs accepted. PiKNiK provides enterprise Nvidia A5000 infrastructure. Solana dependency inherits its centralisation risks. Job orchestration details unclear; how much control does the team retain over routing?

Governance Decentralisation: 8/20. NNP governance framework exists with a 7-stage lifecycle. vote.nosana.com is operational. However, only ONE proposal (NNP-0001) has ever been submitted in 4+ years. Proposals require team review before community vote, effectively team gatekeeping. No Nosana Foundation established yet. Signal votes only; the team implements outcomes.

Token Distribution Fairness: 7/15. Team (20%) + Company (25%) = 45% insider allocation. Only 3% public sale + 5% airdrop = 8% initial public distribution. All vesting complete by 2025, which removes ongoing release pressure but doesn’t change the initially concentrated distribution.

Censorship Resistance: 11/15. Permissionless node participation; anyone with a GPU can host without KYC. Docker-based job execution provides isolation. Jobs matched via smart contracts. However, the team controls protocol upgrades and could theoretically blacklist nodes or jobs. No explicit anti-censorship guarantees.

Data Sovereignty: 9/15. Documentation mentions confidential execution as a job configuration option. Docker containerisation provides process isolation. Distributed execution across independent hosts. However, TEETEETrusted Execution Environment. A hardware-secured region of a CPU or GPU where code runs in isolation, so even the machine's operator can't read what's happening inside. TEEs give decentralised AI inference privacy guarantees.Like a bank vault inside a bank. The bank owns the building, staffs the lobby, and runs the security cameras. But what's inside the vault is invisible to everyone, including the bank staff, unless the customer opens it.TEE in the glossary → implementation details unclear. Data-in-transit protections not detailed. Privacy features appear early-stage.

Open Source Transparency: 9/15. 26 non-fork public GitHub repos under nosana-ci (34 including forks), 19 of them with no licence file, and the newest push on 17 September 2026 at our 18 September read. MIT licence on smart contracts. 1,171 commits on nosana-programs. However, only staking contract audited (2022, by lesser-known Op Codes). README explicitly warns “most code is unaudited.”

Returns Score: 47/100

Token Utility: 14/20. NOS is required to pay for GPU compute jobs, structurally embedded in the marketplace. Staking via xNOS determines fee share. Governance voting via NNP proposals. Buyback-and-burn creates demand from protocol revenue. Clear utility design, and the marketplace settlement plus its per-job fee are on-chain verified (Nosana Jobs Solana program; Nosana counts over 4.2M lifetime jobs). The token has concrete use cases on a confirmed-active network; what’s missing is a disclosed USD figure to size the economics.

Value Accrual: 11/20. Buyback-and-burn mechanism: 20% of protocol profits buy and 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.Burn in the glossary → NOS. Transaction fees partially distributed to stakers based on xNOS score. These are good mechanisms on paper: direct protocol revenue flowing to token holders and supply reduction. However, no data exists on how much NOS has actually been burned, what protocol profits have been, or what staker yields look like in practice. Nosana reports about 14,200 stakers, a figure the staking program doesn’t reconcile to. Unproven at scale.

Supply Dynamics: 14/20. 100M max supply, fully circulated. All original vesting complete, so no insider selling pressure from cliffCliffA waiting period at the start of a token vesting schedule during which no tokens unlock at all. After the cliff ends, tokens begin releasing according to the vesting schedule.Like a probationary period at a new job. You don't get your stock options on day one. You wait 12 months to prove you'll stick around, then everything starts unlocking normally.Cliff in the glossary → events. With supply fully circulated, there is no FDV/MCap discount. Burn mechanism is deflationary in theory. However, NNP-0001 proposes usage-based emissions that may introduce inflation beyond the 100M cap. If approved and implemented, this fundamentally changes the supply dynamics profile.

Revenue Sustainability: 3/25. Still the weakest dimension, but the reason has changed. The marketplace itself settles on-chain (the Nosana Jobs Solana program, with over 4.2 million jobs by Nosana’s own count) and it charges a per-job fee, so this is no longer a black box. What’s absent is magnitude: Nosana discloses no USD revenue, it isn’t on DeFiLlama, and the 6x cost savings claim points to low per-job pricing on only $1.74M raised against Aethir and Render. The score stays low pending a disclosed figure and is flagged for monthly re-assessment now that the activity is confirmed on-chain.

Liquidity & Access: 5/15. Gate.io, MEXC, Raydium, Jupiter, and Kraken, which quotes both NOSUSD and NOSEUR in its own pair list. Binance and Coinbase do not list it. The Raydium CLMM pool carries the largest share of a book whose 7-day median daily turnover was about 2% of market cap on 24 September 2026, up from under 1% earlier in the month. Any significant buy or sell causes major slippage. This is dangerously thin. Position sizing must be kept small.

Quadrant: B (High Freedom, Low Returns)

Nosana sits in Quadrant B, a sovereignty play with unproven economics. Demonstrable decentralised inference infrastructure with working technology, but undisclosed revenue and thin liquidity make returns speculative.

Key risks

• Undisclosed revenue magnitude. A verified, active on-chain marketplace with a real per-job fee, but no disclosed USD revenue figure. Cannot size whether the economics work.
• Dangerously thin liquidity. Under $1M in DEX pools, and Kraken the only tier-1 exchange. Any meaningful trade moves the price.
• Most code unaudited. Only staking audited (2022, lesser-known firm). README warns “most code is unaudited.”
• 45% insider allocation. Team + Company held 45% at launch. All vested, but concentrated distribution.
• 98.8% hosts inactive. 600 daily active nodes versus 50,000 registered. Most hardware sits idle.
• NNP-0001 inflation risk. Proposal may introduce emissions beyond the 100M cap, diluting existing holders.
• Deep drawdown from ATH. About 95% below the March 2024 peak, though still above the $0.08 private and $0.10 public round prices.
• $1.74M total funding. Competing against Aethir ($158M), Render, and io.net with minimal resources.
• Single-chain dependency. Solana-only creates concentration risk. Solana downtime affects Nosana.

Score change log

Date	Score	Change	Reason
2026-10-04	Returns	Liquidity & Access 4 → 5 (Returns 46 → 47, D held)	Kraken lists NOS against USD and EUR, so a tier-1 venue exists; depth remains thin.
2026-09-24	Data	N/A	Sweep: job count (4.27M, Nosana’s count), stakers (14,189, unreconciled to chain), DEX depth, turnover, ATH drawdown and repo counts refreshed; stray “no Kraken” line fixed; “investors underwater” corrected, since both rounds priced below today. Scores unchanged.
2026-09-24	Data	N/A	”No tier-1 CEX listings” corrected: Kraken lists NOS/USD and NOS/EUR (Kraken AssetPairs API). The thin-liquidity reading stands. Scores unchanged.
2026-09-23	Data	N/A	Integrity records re-cut: 3 claims now quote Nosana’s own pages verbatim and 4 are our own measurements. Scores unchanged.
2026-09-06	Data	N/A	WS3b liquidity rail: the no-tier-1-CEX claim is wrong. Kraken lists NOS (NOSUSD and NOSEUR in its own AssetPairs response) and trades it in the ticker set; Binance and Coinbase remain absent. Corrected on both surfaces. Turnover 0.908%, Raydium CLMM top at 44.1%. Liquidity & Access 4/15 held.
2026-08-13	Data	N/A	The old tokenomics page is gone (docs.nosana.io redirects, token page 404s). Nosana publishes the 100M total as a live stat tile but never says “fixed” or “no inflation”. That framing was ours, and their own “From Yield to Growth” post says emissions expand supply. Verdict unchanged; wording noted.
2026-08-12	Data	N/A	WS3 Solana on-chain reconciliation (1->4 verdicts). Supply fixed AND enforced: mint authority is null, so no more NOS can ever be minted (match). No freeze authority = accounts can’t be frozen (established). Open-source confirmed (nosana-ci 34 repos, GPL-3.0 dashboard; match). Scores unchanged.
2026-06-10	Data	N/A	Editorial-vs-integrity audit: marketplace_activity verdict is match (Nosana Jobs Solana program confirmed on-chain via getAccountInfo; live API ~3.9M jobs vs the stale 985K cited; per-job network fee visible in /api/markets). Corrected the “self-reported deployments / entirely unverifiable / black box / zero revenue visibility” framing across the verdict, tldr, pillars, pros/cons, body, quadrant, score summary and the Token Utility + Revenue Sustainability verdicts (relabelled to “undisclosed revenue”): activity and the fee mechanism are on-chain verified, only the USD revenue magnitude stays undisclosed. Score values unchanged; Revenue Sustainability (3/25) flagged for re-assessment at the monthly review now that activity is verified (does not cross a grade boundary, D).
2025-03-06	Both	N/A	Initial publish. Freedom 60/100, Returns 46/100.