AKT is the native cryptocurrency of Akash Network and was initially conceived as the sole payment method. When a lease is established, tenants and providers agree on a price in AKT. These leases are open-ended, continuing until either party terminates them. However, the fluctuating value of AKT presents a challenge. Participants typically anticipate stable pricing equivalent to USD, and AKT's price instability compromises its utility as a payment mechanism.
This AEP proposes enabling CosmWasm smart contract functionality on Akash Network to unlock programmable decentralized cloud infrastructure, enabling automated resource management, advanced settlement mechanisms, and on-chain governance capabilities. This enhancement leverages Pyth Network as a price oracle to support AEP-76's Burn Mint Equilibrium (BME) mechanism and extends Akash's capabilities beyond simple compute marketplaces into a fully programmable cloud platform.
The concept of virtual machines (VMs) for the Akash Network revolves around leveraging decentralized cloud computing resources to deploy, manage, and scale Virtual Machines securely and cost-effectively.
Enabling the average "home" user to participate in Akash as a provider is critical to both - scaling the supply side of the network as well as positioning the network to lead in the shift away from large data center compute in response to the oncoming energy crisis
Users often see plenty of available GPUs on the pricing page but fail to receive any bids for their deployment. This causes users to think that the service is broken and likely give up on investigating further. Providing users guidance on why this is may be happening will go a long way in improving adoption.
Currently, hardware provided by a provider is verified using a decentralized network of Auditors on Akash. While this approach is practical for a limited set of providers, the manual verification is proving challenging at scale, even more critical when incentives go onchain and are distributed without a human in the loop. Hardware Verification using Trusted Execution minimizes trust required to verify the accuracy of hardware provided by the providers on Akash network and serves as a fundamental building block for enabling Confidential Computing capabilities, as detailed in AEP-65.
Public clouds (like AWS, Azure and GCP) support Confindential Computing because some customers request this before they agree to migrate workloads from their own DCs to public cloud infrastructure. While a vast majority of users don't ask the public clouds for this (and just blindly "trust" them) this is likely to become a challenge for Akash's growth particularly because infractstructure on Akash is owned by 10s if not 100s of independent providers.
This RFP seeks proposals from established Layer 1 protocols to become the shared-security provider for the Akash Network, a decentralized cloud computing marketplace on the Cosmos SDK. The goal is to transition from Akash's sovereign chain to a shared-security model to address high capital inefficiency from AKT staking and excessive operational overhead. This move will adopt a pay-per-use security model, reducing the liquidity burden and allowing the team to focus on product innovation, particularly for GPU-intensive AI workloads. The partner must ensure scalable, robust, and decentralized security, maintaining strong IBC interoperability. Proposals must detail the L1's Security Model, Technical Integration, Scalability, Governance, Economic/Legal Considerations, and Ecosystem Profile to enable Akash to leverage external security while preserving application sovereignty.