Today, I’m excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Solana to bring web-scale smart contracts to Akash Supercloud.
Akash provides a serverless platform where users can run any application currently running on the cloud while leveraging the benefits of decentralized computation enabled by the Akash blockchain.
Akash leverages blockchain for provisioning and settlement but deployment happens off-chain. This limits Akash’s users from running verifiable smart contracts as the scalability envelope is not designed for on-chain execution.
Solana is the most performant permissionless blockchain in the world. On current iterations of the Solana Testnet, a network of 200 physically distinct nodes supports a sustained throughput of more than 50,000 transactions per second when running with GPUs. These performance numbers are unheard of in crypto.
When we were exploring potential ways to enable smart contracts, Solana was the only platform that met our requirements.
By interoperating with Solana, Akash users will soon be able to run secure and scalable smart contracts on Solana’s hyper-performance platform and pay using Akash Token (AKT). Whereas Solana’s users will soon be able to run distributed applications (like machine learning or web apps) and settle using Solana Token (SOL) on Akash.
Additionally, Akash will provide first-class support for Solana’s validators to run nodes in highly secure and scalable environments.
Currently, validators have little to no option other than to run their nodes on centralized cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud.
60% of Ethereum nodes currently run on AWS and other centralized cloud service providers. This threatens decentralization at the core.
Validators have few alternatives and are forced to make a massive upfront investment in talent, servers, and flexible scalability or choose the big cloud.
By leveraging Akash decentralized cloud, Solana’s validators will no longer be required to do this, and they’ll be able to stay decentralized.
This is a win-win scenario for both Solana’s and Akash’s users.
Since the beginning, I’ve been a big fan of Solana, and I’m excited for what this partnership will bring to our users.
