In recent decades, the cloud compute marketplace has been dominated by three major players - Microsoft, Amazon, and Google (MAG). Businesses typically pay these large corporate gatekeepers to gain access to computing infrastructure.

Back in 2021, the power that these tech giants have to control access to compute resources became very evident when Amazon stopped providing services to free-speech platform Parlor, apparently for not adequately moderating their content.

In addition to political censorship, we need to consider the other possible reasons a big tech company might shutdown an online business.

Disadvantages Of Centralized Providers

Let's say you are renting compute power from MAG to mine a cryptocurrency, or validate the transactions of a blockchain. If this violates their terms of service, or undermines their dominance of the compute sector, your account could be unexpectedly terminated.

Not only are you putting your business at risk of censorship and suspension on these platforms, but you are also paying more than you need to. In fact, the price of renting compute power on Akash is currently 83% cheaper than leasing it from one of the aforementioned companies.

Also, consider that payments to MAG are processed by an inefficient and censurable banking system. These big tech companies do not accept cryptocurrency directly, so your payment must go through a variety of unpredictable banks and other intermediaries before reaching final settlement.

Decentralized Compute Solutions

What if we were to break apart the monopoly on these massive corporate data centers, and create a more efficient and open marketplace for compute/GPU power? Perhaps blockchain technology could enable such a free market.

Akash is censorship-resistant, decentralized compute marketplace where both individuals and organizations can lend out their underutilized GPUs/servers, and renters can bid on those compute resources to get the best possible price.

Unlike fiat-powered MAG, all compute leasing and renting transactions between market participants are settled directly using Akash's native token (AKT), which users can self-custody in their own cryptocurrency wallets.

Akash isn't alone in their endeavor. We also have projects like Golem, iExec RLC, CUDOS, IONET, Nosana, Render, Flux and more that are all racing to decentralize the world's compute resources. The growing need for artificial intelligence is a key driver behind this.

You can imagine what might happen to the value of these compute-based tokens as demand for AI increases. If the value of these tokens does indeed rise, the cost to borrow compute power (in dollar terms) will surge, and could be a potential setback on growth.

If we think even further ahead, when the majority of data centers and GPUs have been tokenized, compute-backed tokens like Akash's AKT could end up being the money we use to exchange goods and services in the future.

Akash Network Details

The Akash blockchain was built using the Cosmos SDK, and is currently composed of 100 independent validators. With a market capitalization of $608 million dollars, it comes in at rank #114 on Coingecko.

Governance proposals to fund network expansion or change blockchain parameters are voted on by validators, and users who hold AKT tokens. If you're a token holder, you can use the Keplr dashboard to stake your tokens and vote on proposals.

The Akash compute marketplace could be improved even further by uploading the front-end interface to something like the Arweave permaweb, to make the entire system decentralized and censorship-resistant.

The Greater Tokenization Movement

Akash is just part of a greater decentralization movement, made possible by the blockchain technology behind Bitcoin.

In the future, we will also likely see the tokenization of data storage, communications networks, energy grids, location services, mapping data, and more. We are also making progress towards the tokenization of real estate, vehicles, and other real-world assets.

If you learned something new from this article, be sure to check out my other posts on crypto and finance here on the HIVE blockchain. You can also follow me on InLeo for more frequent updates.

Until next time...

Resources

Image Generation By Venice AI [1]
Akash Network Docs [2]
AI Chip Brain Image [3]