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This week we introduced The Akash Network to the world with a press release and the open sourcing of our software. You can learn about Akash to your heartâs content by visiting our site or reading our light paper (a friendly version of the traditionally-impenetrable crypto whitepaper), so Iâll dispense with a long description of Akash to focus instead on something a bit more meta: why weâre doing this and how weâre going to do it.
The Akash tl;dr
First, in case you didnât read the whitepaper, hereâs what weâre doing:
Overclock Labs is a company whose projects include the Akash Network. The Akash Network allows companies with idle server capacity (there are a lot of them) to make it available for cloud deployments. Developers who want to deploy to Akash specify their deployment criteria in a declarative file posted to our native blockchain, where itâs picked up and bid on by any provider capable of meeting the criteria. Low bid wins and then the parties move off chain to distribute the workload in Docker containers. Once a workload is live, the agreed-on count of Akash tokens is transferred from the tenantâs wallet to the providerâs wallet on a periodic basis for as long as the workload is live, with all that settlement activity written to chain.
Why Akash?
Weâre on a bit of a mission. Todayâs cloud infrastructure providers have a real oligopoly, which allows them to charge non-commodity prices for commodity compute, inhibits real competition, and crowds out open-source projects. We think thatâs wrong. Wrong for companies and individuals that use cloud compute; wrong for their customers to whom costs are ultimately passed; and wrong for society as a whole because a basic building block of our modern world is controlled by three huge companies. I wrote about the situation in a bit more depth here.
Distribute then decentralize
While the current cryptocurrency landscape is undeniably fascinating, the real power of blockchain lies in its ability to create a cryptographically-enforced, distributed, and open source of truth. From banking to real estate to voting to identity to file storage and more, weâre entering a new technological era where âtrustedâ (serious quotes around that one) central sources of truth are not always necessary. Central authorities are inherently vulnerable and even corruptible, but even when working as designed are rarely incented to act purely on behalf of the communities they serve. So public companies are obligated to maximize shareholder value, not⊠for example⊠to work toward fairly-priced cloud infrastructure.
This distributed approach is perfect for cloud infrastructure. The ideal cloud is decentralized, with thousands of globally-distributed points of presenceâââway more than the handful of hyperscale datacenters offered by the big providers. So how to build this ideal cloud?
Using a centralized approach, weâd make a massive capex investment to build out those PoPs. Instead we chose to use the capacity thatâs already there in thousands of companiesâ on-prem and colo datacenters.
Using a centralized approach, weâd make a massive opex investment to manage, support, collect/distribute revenue AND assume liability for the network. Instead we used blockchain to connect providers and tenants as peers and to allow direct payments between peers.
Using a centralized approach, weâd make another massive investment of time and resources to build a brand that new users can trust with their workloads. Instead we used blockchain to ensure every marketplace transaction is visible to everyone, including payment histories and adverse eventsâââso users can trust facts instead of a brand.
Transparency
We are indeed living in interesting times. Technology-driven decentralization will affect the social and political domains in unpredictable ways. Token sale-driven funding models will affect which types of projects become viable and how they grow, again in unpredictable ways. And from a purely technological perspective, blockchain is new and will evolve rapidly and unpredictably, with new capabilities forming a feedback loop with social, political, commercial, and of course regulatory domains.
So here we are in the early days of something big, and weâre all (yes all of us) pretty much figuring it out as we go. Weâre drawing on historical precedents, making mistakes, enjoying successes, and reasoning our way through innumerable issues. And weâre doing all this while working with a technology that is inherently open and transparent. So we, and the organizations we belong to, must also be open and transparent. Itâs the right thing to do.
Itâs the right thing to do because we learn from one anothersâ mistakes and successes. Itâs the right thing to do because when you admit you donât know something, you open a path to learningâââboth for yourself and for those unwilling to admit it. Itâs the right thing to do because investors and customers deserve full information to make effective decisions. Itâs the right thing to do because the technology demands it. And, at the risk of hyperbole, history needs an contemporaneous record of how this all went down.
With this in mind, weâve made a firm commitment to transparency. The software that drives the Network is still under development, but weâve open sourced it now. Follow our progress, warts and all, on GitHub. We actively communicate with our investors and now also make our monthly investor letters public (full disclosure, we do sanitize them a bit). And more softly, weâre committed to using direct and plain language in all our communication and equally committed to responsiveness with our growing telegram community. Weâre grateful to other transparent projects in the space and look to them for ways to improve. Letâs make transparency a default expectationâââletâs be brave!
Introducing Akash was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not reflect the views of Bitcoin Insider. Every investment and trading move involves risk - this is especially true for cryptocurrencies given their volatility. We strongly advise our readers to conduct their own research when making a decision.