The Akash Community Contribution Program is one of Akash’s newest initiatives to expand upon what a community can build together. Its core idea is simple: create a clear, rewarding pathway for everyday users to become high-impact contributors. The network has already proven the value of coordinated community labor through its Vanguards. These community members work across different time zones to provide faster, more comprehensive technical support than any individual could alone. That success raises an important question:
If a distributed group can outperform traditional models in support, can it also do so in software development?
While the program will still help connect contributors to small, independent tasks when needed, the program’s focus is on building complete, community-owned projects. This shifts the emphasis from one-off fixes to sustained collaboration, where contributors work together to create and maintain tools that strengthen the entire network.
The Onboarding Funnel
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Interest → Education: Users begin by completing Akash EDU to gain baseline competence.
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Collaborative Build Sessions: Weekly Friday calls serve as working sessions where contributors actively build features, fix issues, and learn by doing. Just as important as that is getting to know each other as colleagues and reinforcing a sense of community
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Contribution Activation: Small rewards for contributions in code, design, content, as well as for active participation. This lowers the barrier to first action.
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Sustained Engagement: Contributors can continue working on scoped features and be compensated for approved work, allowing continued involvement without fixed employment.
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Leadership Pathway: Consistent, high-quality contributors can propose projects. With enough peer interest, they can become project leads. For some, this stage could also serve as preparation for applying to the Akash grant program, with the track record and community support needed to succeed.
The Blueprint for A Self-Sustaining Development Ecosystem?
The long-term vision is that the program becomes self-sustaining. By organizing contributors into coordinated projects rather than relying solely on full-time hires or external vendors, the network can:
- Reduce recurring costs for infrastructure by leveraging distributed, compensated community labor.
- Increase resilience by ensuring that knowledge, tools, and capabilities are spread across many contributors rather than concentrated in a small core team.
- Accelerate delivery of new features and tools by working on multiple community-led projects in parallel.
- Generate value through community-owned projects that can bring in revenue or reduce dependency on costly external services.
Our First Project: Akash VPN
The Community Contribution Program’s first major build is Akash VPN. This is a SaaS platform that will allow users to easily access affordable, decentralized VPN services powered by the Akash Network.
The vision is to provide:
- Lower costs (currently free!) compared to traditional VPN providers.
- Decentralization by design, removing reliance on single corporate operators.
- Ease of use so that even non-technical users can take advantage of secure, distributed infrastructure.
The current implementation of this project is available as an MIT licensed project on GitHub. This is our basic MVP which uses Akash deployments of SoftEther and V2Ray on Akash servers of various regions. Further work will be done by community members to implement monetization, user accounts, and auto-redeployment on container restarts.
Building Akash Transaction Explorer
This is our current focus. As Akash moves to a new chain we’re looking to build an Akash first transaction explorer. Unlike other more general transaction explorers, one of the key differentiators of the Akash Transaction Explorer is its native Provider support. It will not only show transactions and blocks but also identify events such as new leases, deployments, or provider updates directly within each block. This offers deeper insight into on-chain activity, making it easier for contributors, validators, and developers to understand network behavior at a glance.
This has been community run from the ground up with the name and design being voted on by discord members. Because this is such a large project, we are experimenting with a testing first development strategy to prevent regressions.
How to Contribute
This program is currently open to anyone who wants to join. If you’re new to Akash Network or Web3 in general, consider Akash EDU as prerequisite material. Otherwise, join the Discord community and sign up to this form. Check out the community calendar for our weekly calls.
There’s a role for everyone. You don’t need to be a senior developer to make a meaningful impact. Whether you’re looking to sharpen your technical skills, grow your professional network, or explore the open source world for the first time, the Akash VPN project offers a structured, supportive way to get involved.
- Developers: Build the frontend dashboard, integrate backend APIs, and create deployment scripts for the Akash Network.
- Designers: Craft the UI/UX to make sign-up and connection seamless, design branding, and create visual assets.
- Content creators: Write documentation, guides, and produce tutorials
- Testers: Deploy the VPN, report bugs, and suggest usability improvements.
Career benefits:
Gain real-world experience contributing to a live, revenue-generating open source product.Build a portfolio of tangible work visible to both the Akash community and the wider tech industry.Collaborate with experienced peers in a distributed, production-focused environment.
- Weekly calls double as working sessions, where experienced contributors pair with newcomers to solve problems in real time.
- Guidance is available throughout the week for anyone tackling scoped tasks.
- Peer reviews and feedback help you grow your skills while ensuring high-quality output.
The People’s Cloud
The Community Contribution Program is more than just a way to get involved; it’s an invitation to help shape the future of open-source collaboration. It’s where builders, designers, and explorers come together to prove that a decentralized community can move faster, smarter, and stronger than traditional walled gardens. This is your chance to make a measurable impact within Akash and showcase what community-built really means. So what are you waiting for? Get started today!
