Join Us at Origin Protocol USA Meetups This FallAt Origin we are all about community. It truly takes a village to build an amazing movement to decentralize marketplaces on the blockchain, and we would love to get to know you!In the USA? We would love to meetup! I’ll be traveling this fall saying hello, demoing our DApp, and asking how we can help you. RSVP links and location details as follows:Los Angeles (November 13th)San Francisco(November 14th)Boulder (December 12th)htt
At Origin we are all about community. It truly takes a village to build an amazing movement to decentralize marketplaces on the blockchain, and we would love to get to know you!
In the USA? We would love to meetup! I’ll be traveling this fall saying hello, demoing our DApp, and asking how we can help you. RSVP links and location details as follows:
Want to meet up but not seeing your city not on the list? Let me know: andrew@originprotocol.com! I’m also super happy to video conference into your meetup to say hi, answer questions about Origin, and talk about how we can work together with our protocols to really bring decentralization to the sharing economy.
I’m excited to announce that I’ve joined Solana to help their amazing team grow an amazing community supporting a truly ambitious project.Last week I joined a phenomenal team at Solana. It is an ambitious project for the blockchain.In January I took a break from working in the industry. Something wasn’t lining up. Something was off. There were all these promises but the use cases and users just weren’t there. It felt like the twilight zone. If we were to succeed as an in
I’m excited to announce that I’ve joined Solana to help their amazing team grow an amazing community supporting a truly ambitious project.
Last week I joined a phenomenal team at Solana. It is an ambitious project for the blockchain.
In January I took a break from working in the industry. Something wasn’t lining up. Something was off. There were all these promises but the use cases and users just weren’t there. It felt like the twilight zone. If we were to succeed as an industry we would have to change a few things (speed of the network being the obvious main one).
As a designer; I always try to make sure the problem is labeled correctly for a solution to take hold. One thing became super clear: the speed of Ethereum is broken, and it isn’t fixable. 15 transactions per second (TPS)won’t scale. If we want real world use, we need real world speeds. Solana currently is at 50,000 TPS and can can scale that exponentially because they looked at the same problem in a very different way.
Enter Proof of History:
Solana is a company that is creating a trustless, distributed, cryptographic protocol built on the back of a verifiable delay function. What does this mean? We’re building a new blockchain with a data structure that encodes the passage of time as data. We call this Proof of History (PoH).
PoH gives us a sense of trustless time and message ordering before consensus. This drastically reduces messaging overhead between nodes in the network and solves many of the existing scalability problems that other blockchain protocols face.
Additionally, it allows us to build a high-throughput blockchain that doesn’t rely on shards, partitions, side chains, multi chains, etc. As a result of this new system architecture, Solana’s new PoH blockchain will allow up to 710,000 transactions per second on a 1 gigabit network.
So what does this mean? You get a secure, decentralized, and truly fast solution. This is what developers have been waiting for. I overheard something at the office on the first day:
So we are basically building globally distributed supercomputer faster than the NASDAQ database that can’t be shut down?
The Solana team completes the raise while working rapidly towards launching the first ever web-scale blockchainSolana, the world’s first web-scale blockchain, has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Multicoin Capital, with participation from Distributed Global, Blocktower Capital, Foundation Capital, Blockchange VC, Slow Ventures, NEO Global Capital, Passport Capital and Rockaway Ventures.The Solana team completes the raise while working rapidly towards launching the first ever
The Solana team completes the raise while working rapidly towards launching the first ever web-scale blockchain — the only distributed ledger solution capable of hosting applications with the computational bandwidth comparable to the modern internet. Solana is the only blockchain in existence with the capability to power decentralized versions of Nasdaq, Facebook, Twitter and all other existing blockchains with computational room to spare.
“Solana is the closest thing to the ‘world computer’ blockchain developers conceptualized in the early days of crypto,” explains Kyle Samani, Cofounder and Managing Partner of Multicoin Capital. “While many developers have proposed sharding solutions for scaling existing layer 1 solutions, all of those solutions introduce a tremendous amount of complexity and create new user experience problems. Solana has done it differently — and is one of the most compelling layer 1 platforms we’ve evaluated to date. We’re very proud to lead this round, and we encourage developers everywhere to take a serious look at Solana.”
The Solana team — comprised of pioneering technologists from Qualcomm, Intel, Netscape, and Google — has built a technology stack hinged around 7 key innovations. The core of these are Proof of History, a solution to the computational bottleneck found in existing blockchain networks, and parallel processing, which unlocks heretofore unseen speed capacity. The result is the most performant blockchain network in the world, one that can already handle 50,000 transactions per second on a network of 200 nodes running GPUs on current testnet iterations.
“We’ve seen the challenges that developers are facing with layer 2 and sharding solutions, and we’re excited to give them an incredibly simple alternative that doesn’t sacrifice performance,” says Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana’s co-founder and project lead. “Every other blockchain is a single-thread processor — that is, they can only make one state update at a time. This is the single greatest challenge holding back the industry today. By architecting a system designed to support concurrent processing, and by optimizing computation for massively parallel GPUs, Solana can process 50,000 TPS across a network of 200 nodes — and it does so without creating any additional pain in terms of UX, latency, or composability for developers.”
With the close of this raise, the Solana team will allocate additional funds toward continued engineering excellence and project management, as the team wraps up work to launch Solana mainnet and public DevNet. Developers can already download the Solana software development kit (SDK) and immediately start building applications on the most scalable blockchain available.
“Expect to see a lot of movement from Solana in the coming months,” explains COO Raj Gokal. “Starting with the Tour de SOL, for which we’re challenging the Solana Community to test the limits of the network, we’re going to hit the ground running as a web-scale blockchain with exceptional transactional capacity, usability, and security. We think this will initiate a new phase in blockchain tech.”
Multicoin Capital’s Kyle Samani explains the investment thesis in Solana, the world’s first web-scale blockchainThis week, Solana announced the completion of a Series A funding round totalling $20 million raised from the most notable capital allocators in blockchain. Led by Multicoin Capital, the raise included significant participation in pursuit of creating the world’s first web-scale blockchain from Distributed Global, Blocktower Capital, Foundation Capital, Blockchange VC,
“Solana is the closest thing to the ‘world computer’ blockchain developers conceptualized in the early days of crypto,” explains Kyle Samani, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Multicoin Capital, which has an investment portfolio that includes groundbreaking blockchain ventures that includes Skale, Bakkt, Livepeer, and Helium. “Solana is one of the most compelling layer 1 platforms we’ve evaluated to date. We’re very proud to lead this round, and we encourage developers everywhere to take a serious look at Solana.”
Samani followed up the statement with a comprehensive blog post titled ‘The World Computer Should Be Logically Centralized’that explains the Multicoin investment thesis for the Solana project. The article provides an excellent opportunity to get more familiar with the Solana tech infrastructure, and what it means in regards to the state of blockchain development. We’ll highlight some of the key elements of the article below with an abbreviated version of the text, but the whole article is required reading.
To begin, there are six key properties that all developers of trust-minimized apps require to succeed, and Solana maintains all of them:
High throughput: the network today demonstrated peak capacity over 50,000 transactions per second on a global network of over 60 participating consensus nodes
Low latency: 400ms blocks
Inexpensive transaction fees: $10 for 1,000,000 transactions
Rust as the flagship programming language (also supports C, C++, and Libra’s Move)
An asynchronous, BFT consensus algorithm
A single global state that supports composable smart contracts
Developers building smart contracts don’t want to deal with layer 2 and sharding. The entire point of having a smart contract chain is that the chain itself abstracts all of the lower-level complexities and economic system necessary to deliver trust-minimized computation, allowing application developers to focus on application-logic. Indeed, when Vitalik unveiled Ethereum to the world in Miami in January 2014, this is precisely what he emphasized: the point of the world computer is to abstract everything that is not application-specific!
While there are many types of scaling solutions being worked on, each of them create idiosyncratic forms of complexity for application developers, users, and the ecosystem as a whole. The last of these forms of complexity — what I call “creating ecosystem baggage” — is particularly challenging to deal with. All of the heterogeneous scaling solutions are responses to the fact that, until now, no one has figured out how to scale layer 1 while also preserving sufficient architectural and political decentralization until Solana.
The case for Solana is one that developers don’t have to depend on scaling solutions (developers will certainly deploy layer 2 things on top of Solana, and they’ll be able to because Solana is permissionless). For the vast majority of use cases, developers building on Solana just don’t have to think about scaling at all because the entire point of Solana’s layer 1 is to abstract complexity.
Hardware, Software, and Computational Abundance
As yet in blockchain tech, scarcity of money supply and scarcity of trust-minimized computation have previously been bundled. Solana unbundles these. The world computer must offer abundant computation, but be powered by scarce money.
Solana’s guiding principle is that software shall not get in the way of hardware. This has three major implications:
First, the Solana network as a whole operates at the same speed as a single validator. This is actually intuitive: if software doesn’t get in the way of hardware, the network will perform at the same speed as a single machine, assuming bandwidth is not the bottleneck (it’s not; more on this in the Turbine section below).
Second, aggregate network performance scales alongside bandwidth and the number of GPU cores. Bandwidth continues to double every 24–36 months, and modern internet connections are many orders of magnitude away from saturating the physical limits of fiber. And while single threaded CPU performance is no longer improving in line with Moore’s law, GPUs continue to double the number of cores every 18–24 months with no end in sight
And third, because of the fact that Solana’s aggregate network performance grows linearly with the underlying hardware, Solana creates abundance where there is currently scarcity: trust-minimized computation.
Tech Overview
There are seven major technical breakthroughs making Solana possible. The section headers link to detailed explanations from the Solana team. In order going up the stack:
Proof of History (POH) — POH is a subtle but foundational innovation on top of which the rest of Solana’s unique architecture is built.
Tower BFT— A POH-optimized version of PBFT that prefers liveness to consistency.
Turbine— A block propagation protocol that borrows heavily from BitTorrent. Solana scales linearly with the bandwidth of the fastest ⅔ of nodes. All other chains scale sub-linearly.
Pipeline VM—Pipeline is a custom VM that is leverages the LLVM to compile code for GPUs for massively parallel transaction execution (not just signature verification). This enables extraordinary scaling gains for Solana.
Cloudbreak—A horizontally-scalable accounts database. Traditional databases like LevelDB cannot exceed more than ~5,000 random writes per second on a single instance. Cloudbreak is Solana’s novel solution to horizontally scale disk I/O. Cloudbreak is based on OS techniques such as scatter-gather to deliver unparalleled disk I/O.
Replicators—A distributed ledger store to address the data availability problem for petabytes of data. Rather than requiring consensus nodes to store the entire history, Solana leverages a second class of node — Replicators — whose only responsibility is to store small fragments of transaction history.
The common theme among these innovations can be summed in a word: optimization. Solana is the clearest example I’ve seen of first principles-based engineering at every layer of the stack. The team systematically identified every point at which other chains slow down (e.g. consensus overhead, single-threaded computation, and disk I/O) and designed unique solutions to address every problem.
Libra and Move
Facebook’s Libra team created a new VM and programming language called Move. Although Libra will not be programmable at the time of their mainnet launch in 2020, the Libra team has already open sourced the Move code base. And it turns out that Move and Solana’s Pipeline VM are more similar than different.
Solana natively supports Move, including BPF and parallel transaction processing. This means that developers can trivially port applications written for the permissioned Libra chain to the permissionless Solana chain and receive all of the performance that Solana has to offer.
This is an incredible catalyst for Solana as Solana benefits from Libra’s distribution while still operating in an entirely permissionless fashion. Based on Solana’s projected mainnet launch in October 2019, Solana is likely to be the first chain to actually support Move-based applications.
Unique Applications
Solana is so performant that it enables entirely new classes of applications that were previously impossible. An oracle running on Solana can provide a price feed update every 400ms. A decentralized exchange that can handle 30,000 price updates per second and settle on a price every 400ms.
Meeting The Community
Over the next few months leading into projected mainnet launch in October, the Solana team is embarking on a global tour to meet developers around the world, answer questions, and show the system in action. They’ll be at Web3 Summit in August in Berlin, Wanxiang Blockchain week in Shanghai in September, and Devcon5 in Japan in October, in addition to smaller events around the world. If you’re going to be at any of those events, please reach out to the Solana team and say hello!
Featuring Solana’s builders and blockchain leaders, it just might be the most performant blockchain podcast in the world.Transparency and communication are essential factors when building the world’s first web-scale blockchain. Without them, neither a network nor the community that enlivens it can achieve consensus or success.The Solana team has spent much of the past year heads down and hyper-focused on building the architecture required to bring 50,000 TPS on a decentral
Featuring Solana’s builders and blockchain leaders, it just might be the most performant blockchain podcast in the world.
Transparency and communication are essential factors when building the world’s first web-scale blockchain. Without them, neither a network nor the community that enlivens it can achieve consensus or success.
The Solana team has spent much of the past year heads down and hyper-focused on building the architecture required to bring 50,000 TPS on a decentralized network to reality. Now that we’re fast approaching a watershed mainnet launch projected for October 2019, it’s time to explain in detail the technology and innovations that make the Solana Network so performant — and how the global blockchain community can get involved.
Introducing: No Sharding: The Solana Podcast.
Episodes of No Sharding — hosted by Solana communications svengali Andrew Hyde — feature core Solana core team members in conversation alongside handpicked leaders and builders from around the blockchain space. With the Solana tech team comprised of pioneering technologists from Qualcomm, Intel, Netscape, Google, and the CERN Particle Accelerator, there’s a lot to learn! Issues of decentralization, scaling, and functionality in blockchain lead the conversation, while the emergent Solana culture means that tangents into more obscure subjects like underwater hockey do occasionally occur.
For developers, No Sharding is the most effective way to get clued in on essential elements of the Solana network as told directly from those building the world’s first web-scale blockchain. Whether it’s scaling, Proof of History, Validator nodes or Tour de SOL, No Sharding has you covered.
Check out the first four episodes of No Sharding:
Episode One: What is Solana?
Solana Co-Founder Greg Fitzgerald joins for an introductory lesson on Solana and its technology infrastructure. The first episode is an excellent introduction to the project, its tech, and team.
Episode Two: How Does Solana Work?
From the brand new Solana office in SoMa San Francisco, Solana Co-Founder Anatoly Yakovenko explains just how fast Solana is, and what really matters when it comes to transactional capacity.
Episode Three: What is Tour de SOL?
Solana Chief Scientist Eric Williams explains Validator nodes, the inner workings of Tour de SOL, Solana’s incentivized testnet event, and discusses his time working at the CERN Particle Accelerator in Switzerland.
Episode Four: How to Get Involved with Decentralized Open Source
Dominic Tseng of Solana joins the podcast to discuss how he went from a Solana Telegram community member to joining the team and working on global business development—and how community members like yourself can make similar transitions deeper into the blockchain ecosystem.
While the first few episodes function as introductions to Solana tech and team, the discussion will quickly progress towards the salient questions posed by the Solana project and challenges facing the blockchain industry.
With the Solana Network approaching a mainnet launch, No Sharding is an unfiltered and extensive look into the Solana project — and the entire blockchain space — as we enter a new phase of performance in distributed ledger technology. With capacity on the Solana network already tracking over 50,000 transactions per second, it’s only fitting to have a podcast that has equally ambitious aims of being the most performant podcast in blockchain.
Find out the process the Solana network utilizes to validate and replicate transactions with web-scale speed and functionality.To get to sub-second confirmation times and the transactional capacity required for Solana to become the world’s first web-scale blockchain, it’s not enough to just form consensus quickly. The team had to develop a way to quickly validate massive blocks of transactions, while quickly replicating them across the network. To achieve this, the process of transa
Find out the process the Solana network utilizes to validate and replicate transactions with web-scale speed and functionality.
To get to sub-second confirmation times and the transactional capacity required for Solana to become the world’s first web-scale blockchain, it’s not enough to just form consensus quickly. The team had to develop a way to quickly validate massive blocks of transactions, while quickly replicating them across the network. To achieve this, the process of transaction validation on the Solana network makes extensive use of an optimization common in CPU design called pipelining.
Pipelining is an appropriate process when there’s a stream of input data that needs to be processed by a sequence of steps and there’s different hardware responsible for each. The quintessential metaphor to explain this is a washer and dryer that wash/dry/fold several loads of laundry in sequence. Washing must occur before drying and drying before folding, but each of the three operations is performed by a separate unit.
To maximize efficiency, one creates a pipeline of stages. We’ll call the washer one stage, the dryer another, and the folding process a third. To run the pipeline, one adds a second load of laundry to the washer just after the first load is added to the dryer. Likewise, the third load is added to the washer after the second is in the dryer and the first is being folded. In this way, one can make progress on three loads of laundry simultaneously. Given infinite loads, the pipeline will consistently complete a load at the rate of the slowest stage in the pipeline.
“We needed to find a way to keep all hardware busy all the time. That’s the network cards, the CPU cores and all the GPU cores. To do it, we borrowed a page from CPU design”, explains Solana Founder and CTO Greg Fitzgerald. “We created a four stage transaction processor in software. We call it the TPU, our Transaction Processing Unit.”
On the Solana network, the pipeline mechanism — Transaction Processing Unit — progresses through Data Fetching at the kernel level, Signature Verification at the GPU level, Banking at the CPU level, and Writing at the kernel space. By the time the TPU starts to send blocks out to the validators, it’s already fetched in the next set of packets, verified their signatures, and begun crediting tokens.
The Validator node simultaneously runs two pipelined processes, one used in leader mode called the TPU and one used in validator mode called the TVU. In both cases, the hardware being pipelined is the same, the network input, the GPU cards, the CPU cores, writes to disk, and the network output. What it does with that hardware is different. The TPU exists to create ledger entries whereas the TVU exists to validate them.
“We knew that signature verification was going to be a bottleneck, but also that it’s this context-free operation that we could offload to the GPU,” says Fitzgersald. “Even after offloading this most expensive operation, there’s still a number of additional bottlenecks, such as interacting with the network drivers and managing the data dependencies within smart contracts that limit concurrency.”
Between the GPU parallelization in this four-stage pipeline, at any given moment, The Solana TPU can be making progress on 50,000 transactions simultaneously. “This can all be achieved with an off-the-shelf computer for under $5000,” explains Fitzgerland. “Not some supercomputer.”
With the GPU offloading onto Solana’s Transaction Processing Unit, the network can affect single node efficiency. Achieving this has been the goal of Solana since inception.
“The next challenge is to somehow get the blocks somehow from the leader node out to all the validator nodes, and to do it in a way that doesn’t congest the network and bring throughput to a crawl,” continues Fitzgerald. “For that, we’ve come up with a block propagation strategy that we call Turbine.
“With Turbine, we structure the Validator nodes into multiple levels, where each level is at least twice the size of the one above it. By having this structure, these distinct levels, confirmation time ends up being proportional to the height of the tree and not the number of nodes in it, which is far greater. Every time the network doubles in size, you’ll see a small bump in confirmation time, but that’s it.”
In addition to technological implementations like Pipelining, there are several key innovations that make Solana’s web-scale blockchain functionality possible. For a deeper understanding of them all, you can read about them on the Solana blog:
There are 8 key innovations that make the Solana network possible:
Solana Takes Over San Francisco Blockchain Week — and You’re Invited!Join us for 3 events focusing on Layer One, Decentralized Finance, and mimosas for breakfastThe global blockchain industry will converge in the Bay Area when San Francisco Blockchain Weekkicks off on Monday, October 28th, bringing together the most innovative and exciting projects in blockchain and decentralization, along with thousands of developers, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts. As a Bay Area-n
Solana Takes Over San Francisco Blockchain Week — and You’re Invited!
Join us for 3 events focusing on Layer One, Decentralized Finance, and mimosas for breakfast
The global blockchain industry will converge in the Bay Area when San Francisco Blockchain Weekkicks off on Monday, October 28th, bringing together the most innovative and exciting projects in blockchain and decentralization, along with thousands of developers, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts. As a Bay Area-native company and industry-leading layer one blockchain network, Solana will be playing a big part in the proceedings by hosting three separate events throughout the course of the week.
The various events will feature a number of the most advanced layer one blockchain networks, a live recording of the No Sharding podcastwith SKALE, and a closing party inviting the most remarkable projects from the sector of decentralized finance.
The events will provide the perfect opportunity to learn more about the most important projects in the next wave of blockchain development, and interact with members of the Solana team at the home of the organization — possibly with a mimosa in hand!
You’re invited to all three events below. We look forward to meeting you there…
Join us at San Francisco Blockchain Week at Solana HQ on Wednesday, October 30th for a night that’s all about Layer One Blockchain Architecture. The event will feature a deep dive into layer one solutions alongside some of the brightest minds in the blockchain industry:
Solana: Stephen Akridge, Principal Engineer & Co-Founder
Near: Alexander Skidanov, Founder
Coda: Evan Shapiro, CEO & Co-Founder
Harmony: Rongjian Lan, Chief Technical Officer
Nervos: Jan Xie, Chief Architect
The Solana HQ is conveniently located just two blocks over from the Marriott Marquis. This event will feature 15-minute presentations from each project followed by a panel discussion diving into blockchain architecture. This event is free to attend. Drinks and food will be provided.
5:30–6:30: Drinks and opening presentations
6:30–7:15: Panel discussion between Harmony, Solana, Nervos, and Coda
7:15–8:00: Ending remarks and networking
Coda
Evan is the CEO and co-founder of O(1) Labs, a software development company building Coda Protocol. Coda is a protocol with a succinct blockchain, making user-friendly crypto apps easier to develop. Prior to founding O(1) Labs, Evan was an engineer for Mozilla and a researcher in the Carnegie Mellon Personal Robotics Lab.
Nervos
The Nervos Network is an open-source public blockchain ecosystem and collection of protocols solving the biggest challenges facing blockchains today. From the creators of imToken — the world’s largest Ethereum wallet, Spark Pool — the largest ETH mining pool, Cryptape — China’s leading blockchain engineering team and contributors to Bitcoin and Ethereum core protocol research and development. Jan is the founder at Cryptape, former core researcher & developer at Ethereum Foundation
Harmony
Our open infrastructure is a revolutionary high-throughput, low-latency, and low-fee consensus platform designed to power decentralized economies of the future. Rongjian Lan was a search infrastructure engineer for Play Store at Google. He published over 10 academic papers on Spatio-temporal querying and map-based visualization.
Near
NEAR Protocol is a scalable blockchain designed to provide the performance and user experience necessary to bridge the gap to mainstream adoption of decentralized applications.
Solana
Solana has built an exceptionally fast, secure, and scalable blockchain network — that functions at 50k transactions per second — for decentralized apps and companies. Utilizing revolutionary innovations like Proof of History, Solana has created the world’s first web-scale blockchain. Stephen has 10 years of critical GPU optimization expertise at Qualcomm and Intel. He led the GPU backend that constantly beat Nvidia.
Pancakes and Mimosas / Live Podcast Recording ft. SKALE
Join fellow San Francisco Blockchain Week participants along with core members of the Solana team for a complimentary catered breakfast and mimosas to get your SFBW morning started the right way!
Solana will be doing a live recording of the No Sharding Podcast featuring guest Jack O’Holleran, Co-Founder and CEO of SKALE Labs.
Jack is a veteran Silicon Valley Technology entrepreneur with a deep background in machine learning/AI technologies, security, and blockchain. Prior to co-founding SKALE, his resume includes positions as co-founder of Aktana and of IncentAlign. He also held executive positions at Good Technology and Motorola. Jack has been actively involved in cryptocurrencies and decentralization as an investor since early 2013 and began working full-time in the space in early 2017.
The event will also be hosted at the Solana HQ, just two blocks away from the Marriott Marquis where SFBW is being hosted. Each ticket guarantees breakfast and drinks. This event is free.
SKALE
The SKALE Network is an elastic, modular network of blockchains built with cutting edge containerization technology and cryptography. The result is an easy-to-use, secure, fast, cost-effective decentralized cloud.
The Future of DeFi — San Francisco Blockchain Week Closing Event & Party
To culminate the end of another San Francisco Blockchain Week, Solana is throwing a closing event and party celebrating the incredible developments made in Decentralized Finance in 2019. The event will feature short and informal panel discussions from the world’s leading DeFi projects, followed by a celebratory party with an open bar.
The event will also feature a fireside chat on the subject of sharding between Solana CEO Anatoly Yakovenko and Chainlink CEO Sergey Nazarov
Find out what happens when Skale, Chainlink, MakerDAO, 0x, and more head to Solana HQ to discuss happenings in blockchainAs the blockchain industry descended on the Bay Area for San Francisco Blockchain Week, Solana HQ provided a welcome home for many of the world’s most innovative decentralized technology startups to connect and learn. With three events over the course of the week that featured everything from panels to live podcast recordings and breakfast mimosas, Solana invited partic
Find out what happens when Skale, Chainlink, MakerDAO, 0x, and more head to Solana HQ to discuss happenings in blockchain
As the blockchain industry descended on the Bay Area for San Francisco Blockchain Week, Solana HQ provided a welcome home for many of the world’s most innovative decentralized technology startups to connect and learn. With three events over the course of the week that featured everything from panels to live podcast recordings and breakfast mimosas, Solana invited participants from Skale Labs, MakerDAO, 0x, dydx, DDEX, and Hummingbot to share their take on current happenings in the blockchain space.
The Layer 1-centric event that kicked off proceedings on Wednesday with presentations and a panel featuring Alexander Skidanov — CEO of NEAR, Jan Xie — Architect & Researcher of Nervos, Evan Shapiro — CEO of CODA, Rongjian Lan — CTO of Harmony, Stephen Akridge — Principal Engineer of Solana. After the panel and presentations, we ended the night with a spirited debate between Stephen Akridge, Principal Engineer & Co-Founder of Solana and Alexander Skidanov, Founder of Near. Both the Near and Solana teams have built industry-leading approaches to scaling, but opinion between the two is divided over the efficacy of using database sharding techniques when scaling blockchain platforms. However, both participants exhibited a strong commitment to working together to grow the industry despite differences in the tech stack of their respective projects.
Later in the week, a live recording of the No Sharding podcast featured Skale CEO Jack O’Holloran in discussion with Solana CEO Anatoly Yakovenko on a wide range of subjects. The pair discussed the cooperation and sense of community in the growing blockchain industry and a frank analysis of the state of blockchain as it relates to the history of the internet. And yes, Anatoly is dressed as a unicorn — it was Halloween!
Check out some highlights from the live podcast recording below…
“We’re all part of a community. I see a lot of people in this room all over the world. A lot of the people in the Ethereum and broader blockchain worlds, although we’re competing, we’re all friends,” explained O’Holleran. “We all hang out together in every city we do events in. I think everybody realizes that a rising tide lifts all boats. The amount of people working [in this space] is so small, that everybody is really going to benefit by partnering.”
“I think the rising tide goes back to this growth curve. We really need to get the world to adopt these technologies to get that saturation point,” countered Yakovenko. “In the 90s, I was a teenager programming, and I remember that there were 40 million estimated people on the internet in 1996. I think the estimates for number of wallets in the space right now are around that 40 million mark. But if you look at the actual transaction flow on public chains, there’s maybe a million monthly active accounts. That’s our addressable decentralized market space.”
“When the internet hit the 200–300 million numbers in the 90s, this thing came out of nowhere called Friendster, and everybody needed to be on that network,” Yakovenko continued. “No one could have predicted that the most important thing out of a global internet is the social network that glues the people on top. No one saw that coming. I’m excited to get to see us get to that point: 200 million custody wallets with humans behind them. I have no idea how to predict what that application will be.”
Completing out Solana’s involvement at San Francisco Blockchain Week was ‘The Future of DeFi’ closing party. The biggest event of the week’s programming, the party also featured some notable announcements. For example, MakerDAO announced that multi-collateral DAI will launch on November 18th, while Hummingbot annnounced liquidity mining and launch partners. The event culminated with a Fireside chat featuring Solana, 0x, and Chainlink.
Throughout the week’s events, a running theme of cooperation imbued the discussion taking place on stage and also throughout the crowd. Although many blockchain projects are taking on highly differing approaches to solving the challenges our industry faces today on the path to global user adoption, the culture of coopetition that has embedded itself is surely a positive sign. Thank you to everyone who attended Solana HQ during SFBW, and in particular the panel and fireside participants who showed the exciting state of blockchain as we head into 2020.
The 12th annual Boulder Startup Week is here! Events kick off this Monday, May 10, and go through Friday, May 14.All events are virtual; for the second year in a row, BSW is online-only. I’ll be honest: that kind of bums me out. I was so excited to see everyone and do my usual welcome, “so great to see everyone”… but we’re rolling with the punches. And I’m glad to see this community come together, as it always has.When I started BSW more than a dec
The 12th annual Boulder Startup Week is here! Events kick off this Monday, May 10, and go through Friday, May 14.
All events are virtual; for the second year in a row, BSW is online-only. I’ll be honest: that kind of bums me out. I was so excited to see everyone and do my usual welcome, “so great to see everyone”… but we’re rolling with the punches. And I’m glad to see this community come together, as it always has.
When I started BSW more than a decade ago, I never could have predicted how far it would go. It’s been amazing watching how it’s grown over the years. This year’s theme is resilience, which couldn’t be more fitting. I’m super proud of how the organizers have taken it upon themselves to continue to support each other through difficult times — including through a global pandemic and a recent community tragedy.
Years later, we continue coming together to celebrate entrepreneurship and rally the startup world around a shared vision: imagining and bringing to life valuable, successful communities and companies. And I hope that continues to be the legacy of Boulder Startup Week. The celebrating, yes, but more so the deep support. We are nothing without our friends. BSW is a powerful testament to that.
Super proud of this year’s lineup. We have over 50 events and 20 different tracks, including UX, OPs, Product Management, Community, and VC. Full schedule is here — make sure to register. It is free and 100% online.
Here are a few of the week’s panels I’m especially stoked for (but all the events look great… know what I’m saying? All the children are my favorite):
Your new Peleton is going to take 8 weeks to arrive. Yikes. What’s going on in the global supply chain for electronics? What’s difficult to source and why? Woe is me. Chris is amazing and has been an amazing person to watch grow over the years.
Love founders. Love feelings (I mean, sometimes). Seriously, though, it’s past time for more candid conversations about mental health — in the startup world and beyond. These 4 panelists gonna get real.
Is there anything better than getting a big fat YES to your idea? Well… customers. This panel breaks down and workshops best approaches, from both the investor and brand perspective. Pass the pitch deck, please.
Most of what we think is true about the entrepreneurial landscape in the US is wrong. New Builders = the people starting new businesses today. Know ’em. Seth and Makisha are amazing and the new book is aces.
Colorado Governor Jared Polis takes part in this conversation with industry panelists on how data is driving the culture of the Colorado economy. In-person outdoor happy hour following this event!
London-based Ops Stories member Alex d’Annunzio leads this conversation that will help anyone working in business operations prioritize and become more efficient at work. Thank you yes.
I think a lot about how entrepreneurs can be better at maximizing their readiness, resilience, recovery, and longevity. This panel’s fully stocked: human performance experts, athletes, healthcare professionals, and founders working on solutions to make precision nutrition accessible.
Yours truly is on this panel so, yah, I’m pumped for it. We’ll unpack the notion that unorthodox arenas demand unorthodox solutions. Startup professionals facing new personal and professional realities every day know this well — and need better tools to navigate with.
Crash and burn; rinse and repeat. Except there’s a better way. Time to talk about core needs, dualistic vs. non-dualistic thinking, and why it’s important to keep good things from becoming ultimate things.
Who’s in charge around here? By here I mean DTx, a space entrepreneurs need to know about. This panel of company leaders explain why.
Are you excited? I’m excited.
Thank you so much to our organizers Rendl Clark, Efrem Rodriguez, and Adam Mayer.
Huge thank you to the Track Captains:
Rendl Clark: Community
Kim West: Relationships
Tom Kunstman, Kristin Apple Niko Skievaski: Health
Dave Loftis: Development
Amy Giggey & Roman Villard: Founder
Chris Meyer: IoT
Allison Scott: User Experience
Dani Larson: Accelerator
Jenney Loper: Physical Products
Jean-Paul O’Brien: HumanTech
Kate Catlin: Product Management
Chris Gustavson: CU Boulder University Track
Michele Connors:WILD
Alex D’Annunzio: OPs
Sarah E. Brown: Marketing
Natty Zola: VC
And a huge thanks to our sponsors: Techstars (title sponsor!), University of Colorado Boulder, Gary Community Investments, Name.com, Technical Integrity, Stream, and Revnt. Thanks also to Black Lab Sports and Downtown Boulder Partnership.
Standing on That ShipThe summer of my seventh year, I was babysat by a VHS tape of Top Gun.My mom tells me now that I watched it three times a day, for 30 days straight.Why? Well, my mom tells me she loved the break. That was the only way she could find some quiet. Without Top Gun, I was a tornado in the house.Why did I love Top Gun so much? I rewatched it again, recently, and I can’t quite tell you why I was so mesmerized as a seven year old. I had watched the recorded-fro
The summer of my seventh year, I was babysat by a VHS tape of Top Gun.
My mom tells me now that I watched it three times a day, for 30 days straight.
Why? Well, my mom tells me she loved the break. That was the only way she could find some quiet. Without Top Gun, I was a tornado in the house.
Why did I love Top Gun so much? I rewatched it again, recently, and I can’t quite tell you why I was so mesmerized as a seven year old. I had watched the recorded-from-the-television-live “edited for television” version, including the commercials for Bob’s Furniture Warehouse and the occasional forget-to-start-recording-after-the-commercial-break, so it wasn’t the romance or complete plot line that kept me captivated.
At seven, I felt that what I saw in Top Gun is what men did when they grew up. Jets are cool. The military? Hard and unknown. They experienced loss. Camaraderie. The message to me was clear: this is what you can do for your country and the world.
That seven-year-old would have been blown away by the day I spent on the USS Nimitz in March of 2022. He would have been so proud of the people I met on that aircraft carrier. He would have been amazed that those people he watched on his tiny television, over and over again, are real. All day long, he would have said — as I did — this is unbelievable.
Through some random happenstance, I was put on the list for the overnight Distinguished Visitor embark aboard the aircraft carrier, USS Nimitz, in 2022.
I’m not sure who put me in. That part isn’t significant. Typically, the people who attend this program are college professors who write their research on naval warfare. Legislative representatives. Police officers. City council members. PR people. The press.
And me.
I’ve always loved the Navy in particular, aviation in general. I’m an aviation nerd. Actually, I’m pretty much a nerd about everything.
Invite me somewhere to experience your world? I’ll be there.
So of course I said yes.
On March 11, 2022, I arrived at the appointed place, outside of San Diego, at 6 am. There, I met the other people who were in the visitation group, since we all had to take COVID tests at the same time. When the tests were definitively negative, we jumped in a van. They shuttled us to a military training facility.
When we arrived, I realized we were at Naval Base Coronado, where the original Top Gun had been filmed.
Recognize this entryway from the movies?
Okay!
At the base, we listened to a lecture about the Navy and their mission.
“What does the Navy do? We provide pressure. If you want to fight the US, we’ll do it at your house. Within 7 days, we can have a warship within 98% of the world’s population.
If you need us to put a warhead on a forehead, we can do it.”
That means that the pressure the Navy could put on a situation — thanks to their incredible training and precise movements — gave other countries 5 days to negotiate a solution to their problems, before an aircraft carrier arrived in international waters outside the country.
I’d never thought of the Navy’s capabilities that way before.
Finally, we were outside. Soon, we’d be flying to the USS Nimitz, which was stationed in the ocean 115 miles from San Diego. (I’m not releasing classified information. You can find it on many ship tracking websites.)
Someone handed me a thick helmet and goggles. We were standing on a military tarmac, looking at a c2 Greyhound plane, a passenger-only plane, meant to hold 18 people.
As we boarded from the back of the plane, passing through the jet wash from the engines, I realized that this aircraft had not been constructed for our comfort. We sat turned away from the front of the plane. Everything around us was metal. There were no windows visible from my seat.
We were all wearing hard gear protection on top of our clothes. My lungs were filled with the fumes of jet wash that remained in the cabin. I quickly strapped myself into a floatation device and 5-point harness.
As soon as we started moving down the tarmac, hydraulic fuel dripped on me and my goggles.
The noise of the aircraft was almost unbearably loud, even with 2 layers of ear protection and a helmet. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t request assistance. I had to put all my trust in the people flying the plane.
I was fully out of control.
Normally, I’m a pretty even-keeled, cheerful guy. But as soon as that aircraft started taxiing on the runway, I started having a panic attack.
I started putting all my energy into meditative breathing, keeping myself away from the edge of total panic.
We’re going to land when we’re going to land. You can rely on these people.
I had wanted to make this flight almost more than anything I had ever wanted in the world. My entire body had been excited to make this hour and twenty-minute flight. But in that particular moment, I was terrified.
I could feel in my body that we were losing altitude. The plane was starting to engage. I had to let go and trust.
When the plane landed, it went from 180 mph to 0 in 3 seconds. The goggles jolted forward in space, but when we came to a stop, they slapped back on my head. I experienced 3 seconds of not being able to control my body because of the G forces. The wings of the Greyhound folded and we taxied out of the active runway.
I breathed out and looked around. Holy shit. I made it.
I don’t think I’ll ever do that again.
When they opened the back door of the aircraft, I stepped out and took a big breath. Then, I realized that everywhere around me was the Pacific Ocean. I was on an island, 60 feet above the water level, traveling at 30 knots.
This island was an active aircraft carrier, the most dangerous 485 square yards in the world.
We were standing on the tarmac of the USS Nimitz. There was no way off this ship until they flew us home. Back at the base, they warned us that — in case of an unexpected declaration of war — we would be on the Nimitz for the next couple of months. If the ship was called into duty, we’d be going with them.
For the moment, though, we were low-level tourists. People wearing helmets and uniforms pointed to us and told us where to go, above the din of the ocean and the aircraft. Someone took our bags and unpacked them in our rooms for the night. It was one of the wildest stays I’ve ever experienced.
We made our way through the maze of hallways and rooms to the Captain’s quarters. He officially welcomed us to the ship. It was so impressive, so rehearsed. Everything was done with excellence.
I had to keep reminding myself, “This is not an air show, Andrew. We’re visiting an active training facility for snipers. We’re surrounded by people who are trained to kill.”
Permission to buzz the tower.
Over that day and the next, we saw every department on that ship that’s accessible to visitors.
In Top Gun, there’s a room with a red light, filled with the smoke of cigars. I spent time in that room. The room is filled with ways to track any threats to the ship. Everyone in there was quoting lines from the movie and I was quoting them back. No pictures were allowed as we watched the sailors track any aircraft within 50 miles of the ship.
As the navigation officer told us, “First, we make contact. Then we use strong language. Then, if it gets closer, we use loud, strong language. Then we send up some of our coworkers to have an in-person conversation.”
(In this case, an “in-person conversation” meant that the Nimitz would send a F-18 armed with missiles to that aircraft.)
The Nimitz can sleep 5000 people. And it can go around the world without ever refueling, because it’s powered by its own nuclear reactor. It can sail forever on its own power. The only thing it needs is food for the crew (it can desalinate its own water too).
Every meal on the ship was split up into a different area depending on the rank and team of servicemen. We were seated at the captain’s table for dinner one night hosted by Captain Joshua Wenker. We had a beautifully presented four course meal. We ate breakfast with the enlisted sailors whose food was more on the college dorm cafeteria side of the fine dining spectrum. The main warning on food was about sodium levels. It seemed like the kitchens were straight out of the 1980s (to be fair the ship was christened on May 13, 1972).
Nighttime view of the Pacific 100 miles west of Baja, Mexico.
It was hard for me to eat there, since I have celiac. No one with a food allergy or autoimmune disorder involving food is allowed to join the Navy. I was told that’s because in a time of war, the Navy needs to feed people in distant locations, with whatever is available. They can’t feed someone with a limited diet.
So, they did our best with the food options and I had no issues.
An empty aircraft elevator overlooking the Pacific.
When I say we saw every department, I mean every department. At one point, we toured the outdoor fitness center next to the engine repair bay and the fire fighting operation.
The Nimitz has a team of doctors and dentists, ready for anyone on board who needs help. We talked with the chaplains, who seemed a little disappointed by the general lack of interest in religion on board. They weren’t impressed by my interest in psychedelics. I didn’t meet anyone who was there to help the sailors with their mental health, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. The Nimitz even has its own court.
It’s clear to me that anything you could find in a small city was on the Nimitz. But this is a city built for one purpose.
At some point, we were allowed to sit in the Captain’s chair. I have a photo of me smiling a big grin. It was an honor.
I learned that the Nimitz was deployed longer than any other aircraft carrier during COVID, because no one on the ship caught it. So they were on that ship, without being able to leave it, for a full year. That was the longest deployment of any Naval ship since the Vietnam War.
There was no intimacy or alcohol allowed for a year.
The Captain, Craig C. Sicola, worked as the Captain of the Nimitz all that time. He, and the rest of the sailors, had to be on duty to launch and land aircrafts, including pilot training and building experience for pilots and the crew, 7 days a week. There is no off time on an active ship.
A very happy author on the deck of the aircraft carrier. I saw another DV ask for their picture to be taken and took the opportunity to be a bit selfish and get my photo too!
During the day, we stood on the flight deck and watched flights coming in and landing. I could feel the jet wash. I could feel the heat. I could feel the insane decibels hit my body.
That night, we stood in the flight tower. I watched the ocean and the jets landing in the darkness. When they were coming in, the jets were flying across the Milky Way, visible in the sky.
Nighttime view from the tower of the runway. At the edge you can see a helicopter at the ready if a rescue mission was needed (man overboard, etc).
The experience that mesmerized me was watching these aircraft — with names like Hornets, Growlers, and Hawkeyes — take off and land on a 300-foot strip on top of the aircraft carrier.
These were training missions. These pilots were young — 26 or 27 — and they had to be trained for fending off enemy missiles fired from enemy aircraft. So they have to practice, again and again, over and over, all day long. They were coached before each takeoff and coached again after landing. Always, always learning more and preparing for war.
Each of those aircraft had an extended hook attached to its tail. Each pilot landed by attaching that hook to one of four wires on the strip, with about 50 feet of distance between them all.
(Wires isn’t really the right word. These were thick, sturdy cables of high-tensile steel wire.)
These wires stretched across the deck. Their ends were connected to cylinders below the deck. Whenever a pilot caught one of those cables with the tailhook of the plane, the hydraulic system below the deck arrested the movement of the jet immediately. This system can stop a jet going 180 miles an hour in 2 seconds.
I couldn’t take my eyes off this. It would have terrified me to fly that jet. But these young pilots aimed for the third wire and hit it almost every time. And then they went out and did it again.
On takeoff, the pilots relied on a team of people who stood on the tarmac and signaled them when to go. I watched the pilots stay alert, not knowing when they’d have to take off. They had as little control as I did as a passenger in the plane that brought us to the ship. Those pilots had to be thoroughly trained and not question anything. When the safety checks were all complete, then they were signaled to launch. A track attached to the hydraulic catapult system pushed the aircraft to the edge, where it took flight.
The team on the Nimitz launch aircraft 364 days a year. It’s such dangerous work. But they are prepared. They are ready. They have to be.
They need to work as a team. They must.
Seeing the teamwork it takes to run that ship impressed the hell out of me.
The one-pointed focus of the entire aircraft carrier was so moving to me that at one point I asked how I could come back and help. “Well, you can enlist.” was the answer from anyone I asked.
Some of the DV’s in front of the tower. Jet blast is very, very real.
The next afternoon, we boarded the same plane we had taken in. The front of the plane was attached to the catapult system, which propels the jet forward and increases the speed of the jet from 0 to 180 miles an hour in less than 2 ½ seconds. I felt an amazing pressure as we took off, and then this beautiful moment of wind beneath the wings as we flew away. It’s the experience of a roller coaster, the most insane roller coaster you could ever imagine that will ruin any actual roller coaster you might ever ride.
This time, knowing what to expect, I didn’t have a panic attack. Being on an aircraft carrier and watching every person there do a job that contributed to the team effort, from cooking and cleaning to flying the jets? That was probably the source of my calm. Every person on the Nimitz gave up some control to be there. But their joint effort kept that small city floating on the sea running as it was designed.
When we landed on North Island, I took off my helmet and climbed out of the plane. We touched land and I took a big breath.
That was quite the adventure, such a beautiful and weird, out-of-body experience.
The boy who watched Top Gun every day was thrilled to be on that ship. But for the adult who grew up to be an ardent pacifist? It was a bizarre experience to realize that some of the people I met were trained assassins.
It’s my habit to talk to everyone I meet. I genuinely want to know what they think and how they see the world. On the Nimitz, I had a super lovely conversation with a 22-year-old about electric bikes and the future of electric vehicles. It was a thoughtful, nuanced conversation. He also happened to be rebuilding a jet engine while we talked.
I asked the hard questions to the sailors too, questions about war and being willing to fight for their country. Frankly, I expected some jingoism or narrow thinking. But they didn’t flinch. Every one of them had tough questions about the US culture and government.
They weren’t hungry to kill.
They were hungry to do their jobs.
They were trying to do the job they were supposed to do.
Honestly, I have ultimate respect for what they’re doing.
After that trip, I realized there are so many democracies still standing because of that ship. There are geopolitical wars that aren’t being fought because of those ships. Even though so many on board that ship were trained to go to war at any time, they’re preventing wars.
I’m grateful. This is one of my biggest joys in the world, a joy I know most people can’t access. I love to get into a world and just look at it.
I crave adventures that let me enter a culture I don’t know and watch what’s at the heart of it. I always emerge with respect for that world. Reverence, even.
What a fascinating time.
This is the plane I landed on the ship with right after landing, wings folded (as all Navy aircraft can do) and taxiing off the runway. “If this isn’t one of the top 3 events in your life, you have lived a very full life.”
FEDML is a next-generation cloud platform that enables developers and enterprises to easily, economically, and securely build, deploy, and monetize their large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI applications. It provides holistic support with high-performance model training and deployment libraries, user-friendly LLMOps and generic MLOps, and a large-scale GPU marketplace.FEDML can serve as a bridge between the AI community and Render’s distributed GPU network. Collaboration b
FEDML is a next-generation cloud platform that enables developers and enterprises to easily, economically, and securely build, deploy, and monetize their large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI applications. It provides holistic support with high-performance model training and deployment libraries, user-friendly LLMOps and generic MLOps, and a large-scale GPU marketplace.
FEDML can serve as a bridge between the AI community and Render’s distributed GPU network. Collaboration between FEDML and Render creates two significant opportunities:
Bringing AI community demand to Render’s compute network: FEDML’s GPU marketplace can include Render, enabling AI developers to seamlessly access Render’s powerful distributed GPU resources. This integration streamlines workflows, reduces development time, and accelerates AI projects.
Empowering AI community: FEDML’s community of researchers and data scientists, focused on advancing decentralized and trustworthy machine learning, gains access to Render’s distributed GPU network. This empowers them to develop and scale real-world generative AI applications, such as secure crowdsourced LLM training and serving.
This would be the third Compute Client to be added to the Render Network. It is open for an Initial Vote (Community Vote) Monday, November 13 and will end on the 16th at 6pm PST.
Render Network AMA / Q3 2024Debut Community Hangout on X Spaces — Q3 2024Hey Render Community,It has been an exciting start to the year. AI and GPU are the hottest acronyms on the lips of every tech startup we can think of. The Render Network is the first decentralized GPU network to cater to the needs of 3D artists by providing a near limitless number of GPUs to accelerate rendering workflows from days and weeks to minutes and hours. The flexibility of the Render Ne
It has been an exciting start to the year. AI and GPU are the hottest acronyms on the lips of every tech startup we can think of. The Render Network is the first decentralized GPU network to cater to the needs of 3D artists by providing a near limitless number of GPUs to accelerate rendering workflows from days and weeks to minutes and hours. The flexibility of the Render Network allows us to also tap into the emerging sector of AI, from compute clients requiring more GPU power to the emerging sector of Generative AI.
Over the past few weeks we have collated some of the key questions from the community. With such a wide range of questions — from those getting started with creating art to seasoned veterans patiently waiting for key updates — we decided to split this AMA in two parts; an Intro and a Technical AMA.
Let’s dive in!
Render Network Intro AMA:
1. Where do we find information about the foundation?
We are a not-for-profit dedicated to maintaining the core Render Network protocol and growing its community.
3. What render engines are supported except Octane?
The main engine supported is Octane, as it scales very linearly and has support for pretty much every digital content creation app — so everyone using Octane can effectively use the render network.
Other engines are currently in alpha/beta and are due for release after further testing, bug fixing, and development etc. These are:
Redshift (works but users need to be manually added to the beta)
Blender’s Cycles
You can also upload C4D files directly using the native Standard, Physical renderer, or Octane.
4. What file formats are supported except orbx?
ORBX export is a must on all 3D apps for the moment. C4D users can upload .c4d files directly (our first native integration), however we are working on making that as smooth as possible and are working on a Wizard which will help with the process. This Wizard should also be useful for developing a similar tool for Blender once we have Cycles on the network.
5. How can a PC owner add his/her own PC to the render network?
Users can apply at renderfoundation.com/gpu — there is a long waitlist but we’ll be adding more of those that sign up as usage of the network increases.
6. Is there a dedicated website for artists with simplified information about the service and it’s costs?
Currently we have our Knowledge Base, along with a few artists that have produced How-To videos. We are also working on creating more content for users.
Q1. Are we getting close to completing integrations with additional render engines? Is there something that needs to be implemented before these integrations can go live, or has other work been prioritized ahead of the integrations? Do you think having more developers solely focused on the Render Network would help expedite these integrations?
Multi-Render integrations started with Arnold Render, but the near-term focus has shifted to Maxon’s Redshift and Blender’s Cycles. These integrations present the greatest opportunities and overlap with current users. Significant progress has been made on both fronts. Today, Maxon’s Physical and Standard 3rd-party CPU renderers are integrated.
Redshift is in alpha testing with promising results so far. We are working with the Maxon team to extend and refine Redshift to resolve blocking issues currently preventing us from moving to beta. This is a complex process given the decentralized architecture of the network.
We have also started integrating Blender and Cycles, showing good progress due to our experience with Redshift. We are not yet at the alpha stage but are moving in that direction with a roadmap for implementing a similar ‘Wizard’ application to make Cycles usage more frictionless on the Render Network.
The Arnold integration announced four years ago was very different from the deep C4D+ Redshift and Blender + Cycles integrations in process. The concept is to make Standard Surface a core material system standard that would work natively on the Render Network, enabling users to mix and match renderers like Arnold and eventually Brigade. Starting with Redshift and Cycles as core integrations, Arnold and UE are potential candidates for this type of deep integration if the community prioritizes.
It is not simply a matter of adding more developers; these are complex dependent systems that involve third parties.
In addition, it is important to remember that the network is not simply a distributed render farm, which actually would be much simpler to implement. The Render Network builds a layer of granular transparency in terms of provenance of art & 3D assets, which will provide future value to artists.
Q2. Has the team started marketing/pushing the use of the network to the other 99% of Octane users?
Currently, our efforts are more about pull than push, focusing more on awareness than pushing use of the network per se. This is because it currently requires a more expert-level user to get the most value from the network. The team is prioritizing making the network easier to use for the average user before broader outreach and has made significant progress. The team is in the process of completing the C4D plugin Wizard (RNP12) that simplifies moving scenes from C4D to Render and includes automated checks and fixes for common issues observed over the past four years.
The rollout of the Wizard will begin more widespread outreach and will include a prominent link to the Render Network from within the C4D Octane plugin, representing the start of a broad marketing push across C4D + Octane and C4D + Redshift users (once Redshift is unblocked by Maxon).
This will be paired with emissions set aside for creator rewards via several marketing initiatives, and the completion of the BME implementation with simplified RENDER artist-side purchasing. With these in place, the network will be better positioned for large-scale outreach, including prominently featuring Render during the largest Octane event of the year, the annual Black Friday Octane release.
In user outreach, an important factor to consider is attrition and conversion rates, with word of mouth within the tight-knit ecosystem of professional 3D artists adding to these. For now, we are focusing on catering to and learning from lead users, with the goal of being well-positioned to achieve high conversion rates on wide outreach, and we are making great progress.
Keep an eye on our socials — when we start onboarding more artists you’ll definitely notice it.
Q3. Realistically, how long do you think it will take to have the Stability AI models optimized and running on the network?
Stability AI models are currently run on the network via Compute Clients (e.g., ionet’s BC8 runs inference on a fine-tuned stability OSS model). These are not yet utilizing the BME model, and io.net is still completing their integration.
If the question relates to Emad’s RNP011, it’s honestly too early to tell as we need more information from Emad, which is one of the reasons why we have not pushed the RNP forward yet.
Q4. Are there any significant updates that can be shared regarding dynamic NFTs that the team was discussing with Beeple, $M for Metaverse, and/or the artist/creator monetization opportunities that have been discussed previously?
Nothing to share here at the moment. We have had active discussions regarding both recently and hope to have more to share as these discussions continue.
Q5. For the last two years or so, messaging has been that the team is focused on increasing network usage. Have those efforts been successful? What other approaches has the team considered?
Yes, usage has consistently increased every year since the network was formed.
There were several key learnings over this period that led to the integration of native C4D files with Redshift, a C4D wizard, Blender + Cycles, and allocating a significant percentage of emissions to artists (which started this quarter).
Q6. When will the API/SDK be open to the public?
Both Compute Client and Render APIs are available for integration, and currently have third parties working on integrations. There is no timeline on when we would make these publicly available, but it’s not hard for anyone to approach us, and if their project makes sense, gain access via the Render Network Foundation and Grants program.
Q7. Does the team think some of the functionality of the compute clients will be added directly to the network? For example, wouldn’t it benefit the Render Network to receive AI/compute workflows directly instead of through a compute client with its own token economy?
Perhaps this is more a question for the community as it would require significant engagement.
Some of the key reasons we supported an API approach include:
As of yet, none of these compute clients have achieved hypergrowth (product market fit) using decentralized consumer GPUs. Should that change, it would provide a good reason for the community to consider a more direct approach.
Compute clients who use render nodes drive value to the Render community. Currently, most of the Compute Clients are actively chasing their own scarce, high-end Enterprise GPUs, whereas we are focused on creators who own an abundance of high-end consumer GPUs.
There are a lot of exciting AI applications building off popular image generators like Stable Diffusion that can run on consumer GPUs, and we think these would be the best fit for native integrations, e.g., apps building their infrastructure directly on the Render Network.
Q8. With the opt-in option for serving compute clients as a node operator and the initial writeup of RNP-011, it seems the node structure is becoming more fragmented and confusing with several layers and tiers of nodes. What are the benefits of having a somewhat fragmented node pool with some nodes being core render nodes, some nodes only serving compute clients, and others serving both?
Running separate pools per client has allowed us to limit our investment while these clients find product market fit.
The architecture for Compute Clients is very different from rendering. Each client needs a specific Docker/Kubernetes VM pre-installed along with their node software running.
Render nodes run a very thin client with the software and job streamed to them to maintain security. It will be a complex task to merge nodes.
Q9. What metric is used to determine when to add a node from the waitlist?
Utilization. We need to be closer to 10X where we are today. This is a moving target as existing nodes keep upgrading and therefore increasing the overall network OB.
Q10. What are the largest hurdles/challenges that you think the Render Network faces over the next 1–2 years?
We are in the middle of several disruptive changes:
Open-source DCCs starting to gain traction vs. paid
AI disrupting DCCs
AI/neural rendering/diffusion emerging as methods for creating content
The transition of the internet to 3D
All will need GPU power, but it will be critical to remain nimble and adapt our offering to maximize the opportunities that emerge from this.
Q11. What do you think has been the biggest missed opportunity (if any) for the Render Network over the last few years?
That’s hard to say, as the network has done really well in positioning. For example, we acted early on the Solana integration, being one of the first large networks to transition L1s, and that has turned out exceptionally well. The network also integrated AI into its roadmap in an actionable and thoughtful way, focusing on 3D AI models with DRM tools that appeal to, rather than compete with, creators and media and entertainment organizations at large.
Possibly not being able to focus on open-source DCCs earlier was a missed opportunity, but adding Blender Cycles to the network as a deep integration is a huge step forward in that regard. We are very excited about it.
Q12. In hindsight, given the current burn numbers and the recent RNP to reduce node rewards per epoch, do you think you would’ve delayed the implementation of BME until network usage increased?
If we had delayed, we would not have had the benefit of being able to allocate emissions to areas like creator rewards. My understanding from Helium is that they regularly rebalance, and a lot changes in six months.
Q13. Is there any concern about the lackluster voter participation in RNPs? Has the team thought of any ways to further promote or incentivize participation in network governance?
It is frustrating. Holders on CEXs can’t vote, and larger holders have genuine legal concerns. It is not an incentive issue; hopefully, someone in the crypto ecosystem comes up with a better solution for all, as this is a crypto problem, not a Render Network problem.
Q14. What are the top 3 things the community can do to help the Render Network?
Participate, vote, and market the project.
We are increasing our social network presence on a wide range of social platforms — we encourage you to engage with our content!
Q15. What steps are being taken to lower the barriers for integrating into the Render Network? Current RNPs like Ionet and Prime Intellect require “integration” and “plugins.” Are we moving towards a future where individuals can easily use the API to leverage the network on their own?
It’s not that simple. If we wanted to, we could give key access to nodes via API, but there are obvious trade-offs. Creators don’t necessarily want to give up root access and need to use their nodes periodically.
Otherwise, some software needs to be pre-installed (which is what we are doing for each compute client pool).
I would challenge the person asking this question to come up with a use case.
Q16. When will it be possible to use macOS or iOS as a node (iPad or MacBook)?
This is dependent on several factors:
For render nodes, Apple devices need to achieve sufficient rendering OB (they are improving with each new M series release).
We would also need increased usage to the point of needing to open the waitlist.
For Compute Clients, this could be sooner, as io.net has made some progress getting Ray to run on macOS.
Q17. What do you anticipate being the greatest driver of demand for the network in the next 6 months (i.e., calendar year 2024)? Can the team be more transparent with timelines and KPIs? Given that Jules’ focus is multi-decade, it’s very difficult to understand the timeframe on certain initiatives. More frequent opportunities for AMAs with the community could help a lot of FUD that grows only because there isn’t enough communication.
It’s hard to say which will win out of all of these:
C4D wizard
Redshift official release and marketing
Creator rewards
3D, Vision Pro, and large-scale sphere-type demand
Expanded VFX usage
Blender and Cycles
Third-party render API integrations
Existing compute client PMF
New compute clients
Black Friday release with tighter Render integration
Almost all have third-party dependencies, which is why timelines are not preferable. The best place to track progress will be stats.renderfoundation.com and X.
Q18. Jules once mentioned that the plan is to support Hugging Face spaces as modules. What is the status of this?
Nothing to share here at the moment, but stay tuned.
Q19. Emad is talking about some new decentralized AI project. How will Render be involved in this? Exciting!
Yes, it is exciting, but it’s still too early to tell. We are looking to Emad to provide more guidance here.
Q20. A compute client integrated with a competing crypto project before Render, even though they were announced as a compute client first. Is there anything holding clients back from integration, and will there be KPIs and deadlines for compute clients going forward?
Compute Clients, of course, have integration deadlines and performance milestones. We are continually learning from successive engagements, and our processes are always being refined. It is in our interest, as well as our compute clients, to find a product market fit and to have usage increase.
We hope you enjoyed this AMA update and found the answers enlightening. To stay informed about all the latest news, updates, and events, be sure to join our social channels. Connect with us on X, Telegram, Discord, Facebook, Reddit, and LinkedIn, to keep the conversation going and be part of our vibrant community.
Thank you for your continued support and enthusiasm for the Render Network. Together, we are shaping the future of decentralized rendering and AI technology.
Make sure to join our weekly Spaces on X, and in the meantime, tune into today’s session:
Stay tuned and stay connected!
The Render Network Foundation
Render Network AMA / Q2 2024 was originally published in Render Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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