In this Episode of Akash Weekly Spaces (Oct 28th) Greg Osuri, the CEO of Overclock Labs gives an update on Akash Mainnet V4 launch & Ecosystem developments and James Friel, the Director of Business Development at Axelar Network discusses Axelar and intraoperability in Web3.
Read our notes below to learn more.
Akash Background
Akash lets you be sovereign at scale by tapping into a vast resource network of data centers in a permissionless manner.
Akash V4
Akash Mainnet V4 is on schedule for release in 2 weeks.
All major bugs & issues have been resolved.
A new Feature of V4 is the first-ever open marketplace for IP addresses.
V4 is the first prerequisite for the big vision of a GP-GPU marketplace.
Chia
World Bank planning to build a carbon offset registry on Chia (decentralized software powered by Akash software).
Evergreen Miner, a plugin miner to mine Chia is coming soon.
Chia uses a concept called plots to take away computational heavy code from the consensus mechanism.
Building on Akash
Alter Dapp is a decentralized messaging system that uses Secret Network for encryption and Akash for delivery.
Cloudmos (a decentralized computation storage marketplace on Akash) launches a new ease-of-use feature, an alert system for topping up payments on storage.
Axelar Updates
Axelar will power the crosschain future by delivering secure crosschain communication.
Users will be able to connect to any asset or application on any chain with one click.
axelarscan.io is the public block explorer to check transactions.
Axelar is connecting 27 chains, mostly within the Cosmos ecosystem using Tendermint SDKs.
270k transactions with 1.5 bn total volume.
Token Launched Sept 27th, 2022, the validator program launched 50 validators.
Axelars main function is “general message passing” between blockchains allowing the exchange of value. Going from Cosmos SDK chains to EVM will be available in Q4 this year.
The team will be working on connecting some new technologies like the Move chain used by Sui and Aptos, as well as some ZK-based chains.
Greg & James AMA
Q: What are your thoughts on adoption metrics being flat for the past 12 months?
Active applications have been trending sideways (net new applications are 0).
Metrics are too early and small to worry about measuring.
The biggest reason people leaving Akash (it’s a prepaid system that must be funded upfront) people forget to re-up their payment.
Infrastructure is built to deploy stable payments (USDC payments).
Allowing for the automation of payments in a stable asset for better user retention.
Once Akash gets to an open market for GPUs it will have many more use cases as the most powerful cloud provider.
Akash adoption will reach a critical event when one of the users or companies building on Akash uses the infrastructure to do incredible things gaining a competitive advantage.
GPUs will be the foundation for a lot of adoption.
Q: What are the main upgrades that are being made in Mainnet 4 for Akash Network? & What are the long-term plans for the adoption of Akash?
The multi-year long-term strategy is made up of 3 phases for mass adoption.
Phase 1 is foundational security, Akash as a decentralized network needs to be secure at a foundation and consensus level. It was achieved with V1.
Phase 2 is getting to parity in the sense of being on par with other cloud services. Akash still has some more features to achieve this.
Phase 3 is superiority, when Akash is the most distributed cloud in the world & it’s fully open, fully permissionless with all the same capabilities as a traditional cloud.
Once the GPU marketplace is ready, this will unlock the ability to work with machine learning.
Machine learning and AI need GPUs.
Akash is the idea of a “Super Cloud” with a commercial application which has been our thesis for a long time.