Akash Network

What it does

Akash is a decentralised cloud computing marketplace built on a Cosmos SDKSDKSoftware Development Kit. A collection of code libraries, documentation, and tools that lets developers integrate a service into their applications without writing everything from scratch. SDKs are how projects become easy to build with.Like a plug-and-play kit for building furniture. You don't have to mill your own wood, forge your own screws, or design the joinery from scratch. The kit gives you pre-cut parts and instructions so you can assemble the thing in an afternoon.SDK in the glossary → appchain. Providers list spare GPUGPUGraphics Processing Unit. Originally designed to render video game graphics, GPUs turned out to be exceptionally good at the massively parallel math that AI models need. Modern AI training and inference runs almost entirely on GPUs.Like a factory with 10,000 workers doing the same simple task in parallel, versus a CPU which is more like 10 workers each doing different complex tasks. AI training involves doing simple math a million times per second on a million numbers, which is exactly what the GPU factory is designed for.GPU in the glossary →, CPU, memory and storage capacity. Tenants describe workloads in SDL (a YAML-based Stack Definition Language), submit deployment orders on-chain, and providers bid via reverse auction. Lowest qualifying bid wins. Workloads run in Kubernetes containers on provider hardware.

The chain handles order matching, escrow payments and provider attestationAttestationA cryptographic proof that a piece of code is running on a specific hardware enclave in an unmodified state. Attestation lets remote users verify that a service is genuinely running what it claims to be running.Like a tamper-evident seal on a medicine bottle. The seal itself doesn't make the medicine safe, but it gives you a way to verify that nobody opened the bottle and swapped the contents before you bought it.Attestation in the glossary →. Actual compute happens off-chain. GPU marketplace launched in September 2023 with NVIDIA support. AkashML managed inferenceInferenceRunning a trained AI model to produce an answer. Inference is what happens when you type a prompt into ChatGPT and get a response. The model takes your input, computes a best guess, and returns it.Like asking an expert for their opinion. The training was the decades they spent becoming an expert. The inference is the 30 seconds it takes them to answer your specific question.Inference in the glossary → service followed, simplifying AI modelModelA trained neural network that takes inputs (text, images, audio) and produces outputs (more text, classifications, generated content). In DeAI the model is the thing that actually does the work.Like a very experienced apprentice who has spent years watching thousands of masters make furniture. They can't explain how they know when a joint is right, but they can make a chair that looks and functions like a Chippendale. The training is invisible. The output is what matters.Model in the glossary → deployment for tenants who don’t want to wrangle Kubernetes themselves.

Confidential compute went live on 29 July 2026: tenants can run a workload inside a hardware-enforced Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) by adding a single line to the SDL, which shields data and proprietary model weights from the provider hosting them (Akash and Greg Osuri on X). It’s a meaningful privacy step for a marketplace whose whole model puts your workload on someone else’s hardware. The same week, Akash reported cutting first-deploy onboarding on the Managed Console from about 7.5 minutes to roughly a minute (self-reported).

Founded by Greg Osuri and Adam Bozanich through Overclock Labs, a Delaware-incorporated company (June 2015). Osuri founded AngelHack, a major hackathon organisation (160,000-plus developers per AngelHack’s site), and has over 10,000 GitHub contributions. He testified before the US Congress House Committee on AI energy in May 2025, one of the few decentralised cloud founders to do so. The team has grown to roughly 115 people. Mainnet has been running since September 2020, making Akash one of the longest-running decentralised cloud marketplaces in the space.

The product in practice

Grounded in our Akash review and the render-vs-akash comparison, plus community feedback. We haven’t deployed on Akash ourselves, so the hands-on notes are attributed.

Who it’s for. Developers comfortable with Docker and Kubernetes who want cheap, permissionless compute, and anyone with idle server-grade GPUs who wants to sell capacity. It isn’t a managed cloud: no databases, load balancers or CDNs, just raw containers, so it suits people who bring their own stack.

What it’s like to use. There are two different Akash experiences. The raw marketplace is crypto-native: you describe a workload in SDL (a YAML file), submit it on-chain, and providers bid in a reverse auction, cheaper than the hyperscalers but needing Docker skills, a wallet, and tolerance for a thin provider base where demanding jobs like AI fine-tuning can stall. AkashML is the opposite, a managed, OpenAI-compatible inference service that hides the crypto entirely so users never touch AKT, with the Console web UI and Akash Agents sitting in between for people who want deployment without the CLI.

Provider stability. In September 2026 provider operators filed issues of their own, including a recommended zombie-process script that kills tenant workloads and one lease’s outbound flood taking a provider offline for hours.

Demand, honestly. The demand story that matters is AkashML, Akash’s managed inference layer. AkashML and founder Greg Osuri reported its throughput climbing from around 5 billion tokens a day in May 2026 to more than 10 billion by early July. OpenRouter’s own figures bear that out: the traffic it routed to AkashML alone averaged 4.8 billion tokens a day in May and 12.6 billion in July.

Over the last 30 days OpenRouter routed 16.1 billion tokens a day to AkashML, against 21.1 billion in the 30 days before. That’s a floor, since customers who call AkashML directly never pass through OpenRouter, and named users like Venice and ElizaOS run production inference on the network. The raw GPU-lease marketplace tells a smaller story, with modest on-chain lease revenue and a shrinking provider base, because AkashML’s managed volume settles differently from raw on-chain leases.

AkashML tokens through OpenRouter

Tokens a day that OpenRouter routed to AkashML and paid for, since 12 March 2026. A floor on AkashML demand: customers who call AkashML directly don't appear here.

Last 30 days

16.11B

tokens a day

vs prior 30

-23.8%

from 21.15B a day

Daily tokens 7-day average

40B30B20B10B0B

AprMayJunJulAugSeptOct

Monthly averages

Month	Tokens a day
March 2026	1.25B
April 2026	2.55B
May 2026	4.84B
June 2026	6.68B
July 2026	12.58B
August 2026	17B
September 2026	19.53B

On verifiable revenue, Akash is one of four compute networks we put side by side in RENDER vs AKT vs IO vs ATH.

There’s a demand-quality wrinkle under that growth. Our own on-chain reads of every active lease show one payer holding 52.3% of paid lease demand, topped up from a single custody account. An outside analysis (an X thread of 25 July 2026) attributes that payer to AkashML; our reads don’t identify the payer. If the attribution holds, the company behind Akash is the network’s biggest tenant, and either way the headline on-chain spend number isn’t a clean read of independent third-party demand.

That share was 72.5% in August, and it fell for the wrong reason. The largest payer cut its lease spend by more than half while everyone else’s held at about 3136 ACT a day (ACT is a dollar-pegged compute credit), leaving total paid lease demand at 6578 ACT a day. AkashML’s OpenRouter traffic fell less steeply over the same months, so it’s not yet clear whether the managed layer needs fewer leases per token or is moving work off the open marketplace.

The vision. Akash is betting that permissionless, self-custodial compute becomes a default as AI workloads spread, and AkashML’s throughput through OpenRouter, from 2.5 billion tokens a day in April to 19.5 billion in September, suggests the managed-inference wedge is landing, and the chart above shows whether it holds. Supply is the constraint, and recent moves lower the barrier to providing: Mainnet 18’s Resource Reclamation (AEP-82, shipped 11 June 2026) unlocks idle enterprise GPUs, while Homenode opens the door to anyone with a gaming or workstation NVIDIA card, no Kubernetes needed.

Founder Greg Osuri frames the deeper bet as energy, not chips: homes are “mini power plants” with excess solar and wind, and Homenode turns that distributed energy into compute. The catch is the economics: at Messari’s Q1 2026 figure of roughly a million dollars of annualised lease revenue and one-third GPU utilisation, a residential node’s income case is thin (see how to run an Akash provider for the requirements and earnings maths), so supply scales only if the AkashML demand keeps growing and BME routes that spend back to provider yield.

Value proposition

Cost. Akash compute runs 50-85% cheaper than AWS, GCP and Azure for comparable workloads. The reverse auction model drives prices down because providers compete for your deployment rather than you accepting a posted rate.

Permissionless supply is the structural differentiator. Anyone with qualifying hardware can become a provider. No approval process, no relationship required, no geographic restrictions. This is the opposite of how Render operates, where node operators need Foundation approval.

For the sovereignty thesis, the value is clear: you deploy containerised workloads on infrastructure that no single entity controls, pay with a self-custodial walletWalletSoftware that stores the private keys needed to control tokens on a blockchain. A wallet does not actually hold any tokens. The tokens live on the chain. The wallet holds the keys that prove you own them.Like the key to a safe deposit box. The key doesn't contain your valuables. The valuables sit in the bank's vault. The key is what proves you're allowed to open the box and take them.Wallet in the glossary →, and no platform collects data about what you are running. Venice uses Akash GPUs for its inference workloads. Morpheus routes compute through Akash providers. ElizaOS runs AI agents on the network. These are named customers running production workloads, not testnet experiments.

The counter-narrative is scale. Messari put average active providers at 58 in Q1 2026, down from 63 in Q4 2025 and 69 a year earlier. The Akash Console’s own history makes that the lowest quarter since 2023, and the count hasn’t recovered: its 30-day average is 58.9, against a 2024 peak of 82.8. Messari’s Q1 GPU figures were 334 units of capacity with 84 in active use, against the millions AWS runs.

Akash active providers

Trailing 30-day average of the daily active-provider count on the Akash Console, since March 2023. An active provider is one that passes the Console's uptime check.

30-day average

58.9

daily range 56 to 62

Peak average

82.8

Apr 2024

100806040200

Peak 82.8 58.9

202420252026

Quarterly averages

Quarter	Average active providers
2023 Q2	37.5
2023 Q3	41.7
2023 Q4	50.3
2024 Q1	72.6
2024 Q2	74.2
2024 Q3	60.6
2024 Q4	66.8
2025 Q1	69.4
2025 Q2	70.5
2025 Q3	62.9
2025 Q4	63.3
2026 Q1	59
2026 Q2	64.8
2026 Q3	59.7

The “decentralised AWS” framing is aspirational. The reality is a functional but small marketplace that serves a specific niche: developers and projects that value permissionless deployment over managed services. GPU utilisation in Q1 2026 was 33.7% per Messari (flat against Q4 2025), the highest utilisation rate across the four resource classes but with the absolute base measured in tens of GPUs rather than thousands.

Akash Homenode opened early access on 25 February 2026 and moved to open beta on 10 August 2026, when @akashnet announced Windows and Linux installers and support for RTX 5090, 4090 and 3090 cards. The Homenode site adds the RTX Pro 6000 and quotes earnings net of a 30% Homenode fee. The Akash Agents platform launched on 26 March 2026, providing one-click AI agent deployment on permissionless compute and seeded with OpenClaw and Nous Research’s Hermes. Both are structural responses to the provider attrition and the AI workload mix that now drives demand, but adoption metrics aren’t yet available.

Homenode is unlikely to lift the provider count by itself. AEP-60, Akash’s design spec for the MVP, specifies that the Akash Core Team runs each provider’s control nodes while home users join as worker nodes, so under that design new home GPUs add capacity inside providers the core team operates. Two months into the open beta, the Console’s provider count is no higher than Messari’s Q1 average. The better test of Homenode is GPU capacity, alongside whether independently run providers grow with it.

Tokenomics

AKT launched via IEO on BitMax (now AscendEX) in October 2020 at $0.38-$0.77 per tokenTokenA digital unit of value or access rights tracked on a blockchain. Tokens can represent ownership in a project, a right to use a service, a share of future revenue, or simply a tradable asset with no underlying claim.Like a physical poker chip a casino issues. The chip itself has no value. What makes it worth something is what it lets you do at the casino, what the casino has promised, and how much other people will pay you for it.Token in the glossary →. Total raise across all rounds: $4.1 million ($1.31 million seed from CrunchFund in 2017, $2 million private sale in 2019, roughly $800,000 IEO). By crypto standards, this is tiny, and that matters. Low funding means less VCVCVenture Capital. Private investors who fund projects at an early stage in exchange for equity or token allocations. VC rounds are typically pre-launch, at steep discounts to any future public price, with multi-year vesting.Like angel investors in a startup who buy shares before the company goes public. They take more risk because the company might fail, so they get a better price. Once the company IPOs they can sell, and the public market pays whatever price it thinks is fair.VC in the glossary → overhang, less misaligned incentive, and less pressure to juice metrics for investor returns.

Genesis supply was 100 million AKT. Long-term distribution of max supply:

• MiningProof of WorkThe original blockchain consensus mechanism where miners compete to solve computationally expensive puzzles. The winner proposes the next block and earns the rewards. Proof of Work secures Bitcoin and most pre-2020 chains.Like a lottery that runs every 10 minutes where the tickets cost electricity. Whoever spends the most electricity buying lottery tickets has the best chance of winning that round's prize. Nobody can fake the result because the proof of their work is verifiable by everyone.Proof of Work in the glossary → (block rewardsEmissionsNew tokens created and distributed by a blockchain protocol over time as rewards to validators, stakers, or miners. Emissions fund network security and participation at the cost of diluting existing holders.Like a company that pays employees partly in newly printed shares. Every year the total number of shares goes up, which means existing shareholders own a slightly smaller slice of the same company unless the company grows faster than the printing.Emissions in the glossary →): 70.94%
• Investors: 10.03% (1-year lock, graded release, fully vested)
• Team and advisors: 7.85% (1-year lock, graduated release, fully vested)
• Foundation: 5.72% (fully vested)
• Ecosystem: 2.32%
• Testnets: 1.45%
• Vendors and marketing: 1.16%
• Public sale (IEO): 0.52%

The current circulating supplyCirculating SupplyThe number of tokens currently in circulation and tradeable on the open market. Differs from total supply (which includes locked or unvested tokens) and max supply (the upper limit, if there is one).Like the number of cars on the road today versus the number ever produced. Some are in showrooms, some in junkyards, some still at the factory. Only the ones on the road count toward what people are actually driving.Circulating Supply in the glossary → is shown above. All initial allocations are now fully vested. InflationInflationThe annual rate at which new tokens are created and added to the circulating supply. Most networks use inflation to pay validators, stakers, and infrastructure providers from freshly minted tokens rather than real revenue.Like a landlord who raises the rent every year. If your salary goes up at the same rate, you break even. If it doesn't, you get poorer without noticing, because the number on your payslip hasn't changed but the ground under it has shifted.Inflation in the glossary → was halved in May 2026: Proposal 322 cut the ceiling from 8% to 4%, lifted the floor from 4% to 3%, and raised the community pool tax from 50% to 70%. It passed with 55.5 million AKT in favour against 0.8 million opposed.

We read the chain’s mint module directly on 13 August 2026 and it returns 4.0%, with annual issuance of 11.87 million AKT against a total supply of 296.7 million. The proposal’s own estimate is that the cut removes roughly 26.5 million AKT of issuance over 24 months. Our review carried the old 8% cap until this check, so the correction runs in the project’s favour.

The tokenomics thesis hinges on BME (Burn-Mint EquilibriumBurn-Mint EquilibriumA tokenomics model where network fees burn tokens while new tokens are minted and paid to suppliers. The system tries to balance burns and mints so circulating supply stays roughly stable when usage scales.Like a business that spends a dollar of revenue for every dollar of wages it pays. Money flows in and out at the same rate, so the total cash in the company stays flat. The rate of flow tells you how big the business is.Burn-Mint Equilibrium in the glossary →), which activated on 23 March 2026 via Mainnet 17 (Proposal 318, v2.0.0, cleared governance with 99.7% YES). The mechanism retired the legacy x/take module: every onchain compute lease now routes through an AKT market buy, with the purchased token burned to mint ACT (Akash Compute Token), a non-transferable settlement unit denominated in USD that sits in the BME Vault for the duration of the lease. Providers receive ACT as payment and redeem it back to AKT at the prevailing market price when the lease settles, so when AKT appreciates between top-up and payout the system burns net AKT, tying the burn magnitude directly to network activity.

The loop has one boundary: on-chain, AKT-denominated leases run it automatically, but card and fiat revenue (AkashML included) is converted to AKT manually off-chain: Overclock Labs buys the token via Coinbase (founder Greg Osuri, June 2026) because AKT’s liquidity in Cosmos is thin. So the “immediate market buy” language in the funding proposals is a discretionary step for the fastest-growing slice of demand.

Messari reports 53,520 AKT pulled out of circulation through BME from activation (23 March 2026) to quarter-end (31 March 2026), averaging roughly 5,950 AKT per day across that nine-day window. The Vault was seeded with 300,000 AKT from the Community Pool. Four AEPs shipped in the same upgrade: AEP-76 (the BME loop), AEP-78 (CosmWasm smart contracts so BME executes as auditable, upgradable contract code), AEP-80 (a native Cosmos SDK oracle module with TWAP and staleness guardrails), and AEP-81 (Pyth’s AKT-USD feed via a Wormhole 13-of-19 guardian quorum). The dual-feed oracle architecture (Pyth via Wormhole, plus Osmosis TWAP) is designed to make BME settlement resilient to single-source price manipulation.

The word burned needs care. On-chain the AKT survives: BME moves it into a vault as backing for the ACT credits providers hold, then providers redeem it back at settlement. Net AKT is permanently burned only when the token appreciates between top-up and payout, and that on-chain counter still reads zero (verified against the x/bme vault module and the AEP-76 spec). The 53,520 is a circulating-supply reduction rather than supply destruction.

The deflationary question is whether compute spend can scale enough to outpace 4% annual issuance, a bar that halved in May 2026. Messari’s Q1 2026 lease revenue figure of $253,250 (down 45% QoQ) annualises to roughly $1.01M, still well below the burn level needed for meaningful supply contraction. The gap between functioning mechanism and meaningful deflation is the core investment question. For the mirror-image case, a fairer-launched compute network that takes 0% and captures nothing, see Akash vs Golem.

StakingStakingLocking up a cryptocurrency to help secure a blockchain network, usually in exchange for rewards. The locked tokens act as a security deposit that can be taken away if the staker misbehaves.Like putting down a large rental deposit for an apartment. You get the money back if you behave, you earn interest while it's locked, and the landlord takes it if you trash the place.Staking in the glossary → yields have come down with the inflation cut, and the higher community tax is the reason. Stakers now share 30% of issuance rather than 50%, which on our 13 August 2026 chain read is roughly 3.6 million AKT a year against 91.5 million AKT bonded, or about 3.9% nominal before validator commission. Against 4.0% inflation that is close to flat in real terms, which is roughly where the old 7.3% nominal sat against the old 8.94% rate. Bonded stake is 30.8% of total supply, below the chain’s own 67% target.

The 21-day unbonding period locks capital during volatile markets. Slashing risk exists: 5% for double-signing, 0.01% for prolonged downtime.

Starbonds, a $75 million securities offering (Reg A+ filing) announced in 2025, is the elephant in the room. This is a corporate fundraise by Overclock Labs. Terms are not yet fully public. Whatever the structure, it represents significant new capital flowing into the entity that controls the development roadmap, and introduces an opaque financial dimension alongside the transparent on-chain economics.

Listed on Coinbase, Kraken and KuCoin but notably absent from Binance, which limits Asian market liquidityLiquidityHow easily a token can be bought or sold without moving the price. High liquidity means you can enter or exit large positions quickly at the quoted price. Low liquidity means even small trades can swing the market.Like the difference between selling a house and selling a share of Apple stock. The house might be worth more on paper, but finding a buyer at that price takes weeks. The Apple share converts to cash in one click.Liquidity in the glossary → and retail discovery. DEXDEXDecentralised Exchange. A trading venue where token swaps happen entirely through smart contracts, with no central operator holding user funds. The largest DEXes are Uniswap, Aerodrome, Raydium, PancakeSwap, and Curve.Like a self-service vending machine that lets you swap one type of coin for another. The machine sets the exchange rate based on its current stock, anyone can deposit coins to refill it, and there's no clerk behind the counter.DEX in the glossary → liquidity on Osmosis is moderate. Proposal 316 (passed March 2026) authorised a 1M AKT loan from the Community Pool to restore two-sided market depth that had compressed alongside the Q4 2025 drawdown.

Proposal 342 (passed 14 October 2026) lent the market makers a further 1,605,394 AKT, for at least one more market maker and more venues. The Akash foundation, which manages the loans, reported 4,288,196 AKT already out under Proposals 280 and 316. Each loan carries a call option, so it can end as a sale: in September 2026 a market maker exercised one and 250,000 AKT became 94,272 USDT, which the foundation rolled into a put option rather than taking AKT back.

Grayscale added AKT to its AI Tools and Resources sector index in May 2025, and Coinbase included AKT in the Coinbase 50 Index in June 2025. Per Messari, AKT rallied 41.6% QoQ in Q1 2026, with the move concentrated around the BME activation date (23 March 2026). See live data above for current pricing.

How to participate

Stake AKT. Delegate to validators on the Akash chain. Earn inflation rewards (~3.9% APY nominal on our 13 August 2026 chain read, near zero after inflation once the 70% community pool tax is counted). Vote on governance proposals through your validatorValidatorA computer that runs the full blockchain protocol, verifies transactions, and proposes new blocks. Validators are the workers that keep a Proof of Stake network running, and they earn rewards for doing the work correctly.Like a notary public who witnesses and stamps legal documents. Validators witness transactions, check they follow the rules, and stamp them into the permanent record. A notary who commits fraud loses their license. Validators work the same way, except the license is staked tokens that get slashed on misbehaviour.Validator in the glossary → or directly. Requires a Cosmos wallet (Keplr). Minimum stake is negligible. The main consideration is the 21-day unbonding period.

Provide compute. Run a provider node and list spare capacity on the marketplace. Permissionless, anyone with qualifying hardware can join. Requires server-grade hardware, Kubernetes administration skills, NVIDIA GPUs for GPU workloads, and reliable internet. This is the more interesting participation mode if you have idle hardware, but the technical barrier is steep.

Deploy workloads. Use Akash as a tenant. Describe your workload in SDL, submit to the marketplace, and providers bid. Typically 50-85% cheaper than centralised cloud. Requires Docker/container knowledge and an AKT deposit for escrow. No managed services (databases, load balancers, CDN), just raw compute.

Build. Four funding mechanisms: Community Pool (on-chain treasury), Akash Accelerate (grants programme), Akash Bounties Board and AkashML partnerships. Go and Kubernetes expertise preferred.

Honest assessment

What works

Akash is the most credible decentralised cloud marketplace operating today. That’s a factual statement, not an endorsement.

Messari’s full-year 2025 report showed $3.15 million in annual revenue, up 128% year-over-year. The Q1 2026 picture is mixed: Messari (sourced from Akashstats and Artemis) reports lease revenue of $253,250 for the quarter, down 45% QoQ from $460,510 in Q4 2025. Akash separately reports ~$5 million Q1 2026 “compute spend” through its own dashboards; the two figures likely measure different scopes (gross spend across all categories vs lease revenue collected by the protocol) and the gap isn’t yet reconciled publicly. Venice, ElizaOS, Morpheus and Gensyn are verifiable, named customers deploying production workloads.

The permissionless provider model is structurally sound: anyone with qualifying hardware can join. Fully open source under Apache 2.0 across more than 70 public repositories (GitHub API, August 2026). Two consequential upgrades shipped in Q1 2026: Mainnet 16 (4 March 2026) delivered the CometBFT Tachyon security fix and store migration; Mainnet 17 (23 March 2026) activated BME, shipping four AEPs in a single coordinated upgrade. Mainnet 18 (11 June 2026) followed with Oracle v2 (timestamp-based price-feed staleness detection, building on the AEP-80 oracle module) and Resource Reclamation (AEP-82), which auto-closes idle leases so providers recover unused capacity. The Akash Agents platform (launched 26 March 2026) and Homenode early-access (25 February 2026) broaden the addressable market on both supply and demand sides.

Osuri’s background carries weight: AngelHack founder, congressional testimony on AI energy in May 2025. Listed on Coinbase and Kraken. Cosmos-based on-chain governanceDAODecentralised Autonomous Organisation. A way to coordinate decisions and manage a treasury using token-weighted voting instead of a traditional company structure. Token holders propose and vote on changes directly.Like a shareholder-run company where every shareholder can vote on every decision, the votes are public, and the company can't do anything the shareholders don't approve. The coordination is messier than a normal company but nobody has unilateral control.DAO in the glossary → with active participation: more than 160 proposals on the chain’s own governance module, seven approved in Q1 2026 alone (Mainnet 17 cleared with 99.7% YES), and the community rejected Proposal #302 for lack of transparency, showing governance has actual teeth.

What doesn’t work yet

The active provider count isn’t a cloud marketplace. Messari’s Q1 2026 figure was 58 average active providers, down 8.4% QoQ and the lowest quarter since 2023, and the Console’s 30-day average is 58.9 now. Provider concentration means a handful of large operators serve the majority of capacity. Compute capacity contracted across all four resource categories in Q1 2026: GPU capacity -57.5% QoQ, CPU -46.5%, storage -37.5%, RAM -41.7%. CPU utilisation rose to 26.1% (from 17.7% in Q4 2025) because providers cut idle capacity faster than usage fell, not because demand grew.

The revenue picture is similarly compressed. Messari Q1 2026 lease revenue of $253,250 annualises to roughly $1.01M; even if the broader Akash-reported $5 million Q1 spend captures activity that Messari doesn’t, the gap between the figures is itself a transparency problem. No managed services limits enterprise adoption to teams comfortable with raw compute. GPU utilisation at 33.7% (Messari Q1 2026) reflects verifiable demand but across an average of 84 GPUs in active use, which is a rounding error against hyperscaler capacity.

The risk

Chain deprecation is the single highest-impact risk. Akash plans to deprecate its Cosmos chain in late 2026 and migrate to a new chain, with Solana mentioned as a “strong contender” but no governance vote conducted. Migrating an entire blockchain and marketplace is technically complex, operationally destabilising, and could fracture the community. There’s no published technical specification. The proper word for the migration is rebuild.

On 16 April 2026, founder Greg Osuri publicly stated that Cosmos management changed the licence on a critical SDK component to prohibit commercial use without an enterprise licence. Osuri described the terms as “hostile.” This escalates the migration from a planned strategic pivot to something closer to a forced move: if Cosmos enforces the new licence terms against Akash, the timeline for departure becomes reactive rather than planned. The destination chain (Solana remains the public frontrunner) and the technical migration path are still not specified in any governance proposal.

No formal protocol-level security audit has been disclosed despite the network operating since 2020. That’s five-plus years of production infrastructure without a commissioned security review. The ChainLight authentication bypass vulnerability discovered in May 2024 demonstrates the attack surface is exploitable. A spam attack in March 2025 caused degraded performance, though the network recovered.

Overclock Labs is a US-incorporated entity (Delaware), exposing the project to SEC, CFTC and compute export regulations. Osuri is the key person risk. He’s the public face, strategic driver and open-source credibility anchor. The Starbonds offering introduces new dilution and regulatory dimensions that aren’t yet fully transparent.

My position

I hold AKT. I also have indirect exposure through Venice (which uses Akash GPUs) and Morpheus (which routes compute through Akash providers). The chain migration introduces uncertainty but I believe the project’s technical credibility and paying revenue justify the position.

Freedom Score: 66/100

Akash scores 66/100 (C grade). Full methodology at Freedom Score Methodology.

Infrastructure decentralisation (12/20): Active validators and provider counts are tracked live in the metrics above. Permissionless provider onboarding with GPUs across independent providers. Geographic distribution is broad. But the provider count is objectively thin and declined through 2025. Starcluster/Starbonds introduces centralisation via enterprise datacentres with “vetted Nodekeepers”. Homenode (open beta since August 2026) earns no credit here. AEP-60, its design spec, specifies that the core team runs each provider’s control nodes, with home GPUs joining as workers inside those providers.

Governance decentralisation (13/20): More than 160 on-chain governance proposals (141 passed, 20 rejected, per the chain’s x/gov module in September 2026) with active participation. Proposal #308 had 42.31% turnout, exceeding 33.4% quorum. Community rejected Proposal #302 for lack of transparency, which shows governance has teeth. Proposal 322 (May 2026) reset monetary policy by binding vote, and we verified the live mint parameters carry the governance module as their authority. The community pool tax now funds community-directed spending at 70% of issuance; Proposal 341 (passed 25 September 2026) paid 230,557.40 AKT from the pool to the Akash foundation to run the on-chain oracle’s price relayers through June 2027. But Overclock Labs drives the strategic roadmap. Chain migration was announced by the founder, not governance-voted.

Token distribution fairness (8/15): Genesis was insider-heavy (34.5% investors, 27% team) but long-term allocation is better: 70.94% of max supply goes to mining/blockBlockA batch of transactions added to a blockchain at a set interval. Each block cryptographically links to the previous one, creating an append-only chain that can't be rewritten without redoing all the work since.Like a page in a ledger. Every page has a fixed number of entries, every page references the previous page, and once a page is filled and signed off it can't be edited without visibly invalidating every page that came after. The chain is just a very long series of these sealed pages.Block in the glossary → rewards. All tokens now fully vested. Total raise was modest by any standard ($4.1M). Not a fair launchFair LaunchA token launch where everyone has the same access from day one. No private sale, no insider allocation, no VC discount. Tokens are distributed by mining, staking, or open public sale at a single price.Like a 100m sprint where everyone starts behind the same line at the same time. Some runners are faster, but nobody gets to start 10 metres ahead because they paid extra. The race is decided by the run, not by who bought the best position.Fair Launch in the glossary →, but the small raise and majority mining allocation are above average.

Censorship resistance (10/15): Permissionless provider and tenant participation. No KYC required. Reverse auction is on-chain and transparent. But Starcluster introduces “vetted Nodekeepers” as a potential censorship vector. Overclock Labs is US-incorporated (Delaware) and subject to regulatory pressure. Spam attack (March 2025) demonstrated the network can be degraded temporarily.

Data sovereignty (10/15): Tenants fully control deployment configurations and data. Self-custodial Cosmos wallets. No central data collection by the protocol. Homenode lets users control their own hardware. But providers physically host workloads and could theoretically inspect containers. No encryption at the compute layer. ChainLight vulnerability (patched) showed potential for unauthorised deployment access.

Open source and transparency (13/15): Fully open source under Apache 2.0 across more than 70 public repositories. Active development with substantive commits across two Q1 2026 mainnet upgrades: Mainnet 16 (4 March 2026, Proposal 317) delivered the CometBFT Tachyon security fix and store migration; Mainnet 17 (23 March 2026, Proposal 318, v2.0.0) activated BME and shipped four AEPs (76, 78, 80, 81) covering the burn loop, CosmWasm smart contracts, the Cosmos SDK oracle module, and the Pyth feed; Mainnet 18 (11 June 2026) added Oracle v2 and Resource Reclamation (AEP-82). All governance proposals public on GitHub. Quarterly Messari reports and internal blog provide regular transparency. Near-exemplary. But no formal security audit despite five-plus years of operation. Overclock Labs’ corporate financials not public. Starbonds introduces an opaque financial dimension.

Path to improvement

Three changes would materially increase Akash’s score:

1. Commission a formal security audit. Five years of production infrastructure without a third-party security review is indefensible. The ChainLight vulnerability proved the attack surface exists. An audit by a credible firm would address the most obvious gap in Akash’s otherwise strong transparency position.
2. Execute the chain migration transparently. Publish a technical specification. Run a governance vote on the destination chain. Provide a detailed migration timeline with milestones. The current state, aspirational timelines with no published roadmap, creates justified uncertainty.
3. Grow the provider count. Active providers average 58.9 over the last 30 days on the Akash Console, level with Messari’s Q1 2026 figure of 58. Homenode (consumer hardware) and the Akash Agents platform (agentic AI workloads) broaden both the supply and demand sides. The target should be hundreds of active providers across multiple geographies before claiming the “decentralised AWS” positioning with a straight face.

Returns Score: 68/100

AKT scores 68/100 (C grade). Full methodology at Returns Score Methodology.

Token utility (16/20): AKT serves three clear functions: payment for compute on the marketplace, staking for validator security and governance, and a requirement for running validator infrastructure. Tenants pay in AKT (or USDC, with AKT settlement), and validators must bond AKT to participate. The utility is structurally necessary. The network can’t function without the token. The gap to a perfect score is the lack of a broader demand sink beyond compute settlement and staking.

Value accrual (14/20): BME activated 23 March 2026 (Mainnet 17, Proposal 318), and the numbers are now on-chain rather than theoretical. Messari reports 53,520 AKT pulled out of circulation through 31 March 2026 (into the BME vault as ACT backing, not destroyed; the on-chain permanent-burn counter is zero), averaging roughly 5,950 AKT per day across the nine-day window. The Vault was seeded with 300,000 AKT from the Community Pool. The legacy x/take module was retired in the same upgrade; the take-rate logic now resides in BME. On-chain AKT leases route through the burn-and-mint loop, but card and fiat revenue (AkashML included) is bought manually off-chain via Coinbase (see Tokenomics), so the burn linkage is looser for the managed-inference volume that drives demand. Staking yields roughly 3.9% nominal on our 13 August 2026 chain read, close to flat against the 4.0% inflation rate. The “coming soon” qualifier is gone. BME is live and pulling AKT out of circulation. The gap to a higher score is scale: at Messari’s Q1 2026 lease revenue run rate (~$1.01M annualised), burns offset only a fraction of issuance.

Supply dynamics (14/20): AKT has no hard cap, and our own chain read on 13 August 2026 confirms it: bank supply 296.7 million AKT, mint module still issuing, no cap parameter anywhere in it. The 388.5 million genesis cap is a starting schedule, not a ceiling. Inflation halved in May 2026 under Proposal 322 (ceiling 8% to 4%, floor 4% to 3%, community pool tax 50% to 70%), and the module returns 4.0% live, or 11.87 million AKT a year. That is a material improvement on the 8.94% this review previously carried, and we haven’t moved the score for it yet (flagged for the next monthly review). BME pulled 53,520 AKT out of circulation in the first nine days post-activation per Messari (held in the vault, not destroyed), still small against the issuance rate. All initial investor and team allocations are fully vested, which removes cliff-dump risk. The token remains inflationary at current adoption levels, and meaningful deflation requires a step-change in compute revenue.

Revenue sustainability (14/25): Two figures co-exist for Q1 2026 and the gap matters. Messari (sourced from Akashstats and Artemis) reports lease revenue of $253,250 in Q1 2026, down 45% QoQ from $460,510 in Q4 2025, annualising to roughly $1.01M. Akash separately reports ~$5 million Q1 2026 “compute spend” through its own dashboards; the broader figure likely captures gross spend across all categories rather than lease revenue collected by the protocol. The full-year 2025 Messari figure remains $3.15 million, up 128% YoY. Named customers (Venice, ElizaOS, Morpheus, Gensyn) generate production workloads, which is the foundation. The flow signal is positive: new lease creation reached 43,540 in Q1 2026, the third consecutive quarter of sequential growth per Messari. The stock signal is negative: active leases and provider count both compressed. Revenue-to-emission ratio remains thin, though the May 2026 cut to a 4% inflation ceiling (verified on-chain 13 August 2026) halves the emission side of it; the gap between “working product” and “sustainable economy” is still wide.

Liquidity and access (10/15): AKT is listed on Coinbase and Kraken, which provides reasonable access for Western retail and institutional buyers. Volume is adequate for moderate position sizes without excessive slippageSlippageThe difference between the expected price of a trade and the price you actually get when the trade executes. Slippage usually goes against the trader and gets worse with bigger trades or thinner markets.Like trying to buy 1000 bananas at the corner shop. The first few are at the marked price, but by the time you've bought them all you've moved the price up because there are no more bananas left at the original level. The shop has to restock at higher cost.Slippage in the glossary →. The notable absence is Binance, the largest exchange by volume, which limits Asian market discovery and liquidity depth. DEXDEXDecentralised Exchange. A trading venue where token swaps happen entirely through smart contracts, with no central operator holding user funds. The largest DEXes are Uniswap, Aerodrome, Raydium, PancakeSwap, and Curve.Like a self-service vending machine that lets you swap one type of coin for another. The machine sets the exchange rate based on its current stock, anyone can deposit coins to refill it, and there's no clerk behind the counter.DEX in the glossary → liquidity on Osmosis is moderate. Community Pool loans to market makers (Proposals 280 and 316, plus 1.6M AKT more under Proposal 342 in October 2026) support that depth, but each carries a call option, and one exercised in September 2026 turned 250,000 AKT into USDT, so the loans can become sales. Per Messari, AKT-denominated network fees fell 23.5% QoQ in Q1 2026 to 635,900 AKT while USD fees fell 44% to $257,580. Not thin enough to be a problem, not deep enough to be a strength.

Path to improvement

Three changes would materially increase Akash’s returns score:

1. Reverse provider attrition. The provider count hasn’t recovered from Messari’s Q1 2026 average of 58, the lowest quarter since 2023: the Akash Console’s 30-day average is 58.9. Homenode (open beta since 10 August 2026) and the Akash Agents platform (26 March 2026) are structural responses on supply and demand sides. The test is whether BME’s onchain demand mechanics translate into improved unit economics fast enough to draw enterprise-grade capacity back, ideally returning the provider count above 100.
2. Secure a Binance listing. The absence from the world’s largest exchange is a concrete liquidity constraint. Binance coverage would meaningfully increase daily volume, improve price discovery, and expand Akash’s visibility in Asian markets where much of the retail crypto activity occurs.
3. Reconcile and scale the revenue figure. The Akash-reported and Messari-reported Q1 2026 numbers differ by roughly an order of magnitude because they measure different scopes. Reconciliation (publishing both figures with definitions, or aligning on a single shared definition) would remove the transparency overhang. Either way, growing annualised lease revenue toward $30 million would make the BME burn mechanism economically meaningful and support a credible value accrual narrative.

Score change log

Date	Score	Change	Reason
2026-10-18	Data	N/A	Added Proposal 342 (1.6M AKT more lent to market makers, 14 Oct 2026) and corrected “no net sell pressure”: the loans carry call options and one became a 250,000 AKT sale in September. Scores unchanged.
2026-10-18	Data	N/A	Demand concentration re-measured and bound live: the largest payer’s share fell from 72.5% to 52.3% because its own spend more than halved while other payers held flat. Finding still established; scores unchanged.
2026-10-18	Data	N/A	AkashML throughput now measured from OpenRouter’s settled token counts, bound live and charted since March 2026; it bears out the May to July self-report. Scores unchanged.
2026-10-18	Data	N/A	Provider count now bound live to the Akash Console’s 30-day average and charted since 2023. Corrected “lowest in network history”: 2023 averaged 38-50, so Q1 2026 is the lowest quarter since 2023. Scores unchanged.
2026-10-04	Editorial	N/A	Product-in-practice sweep: hedged the AkashML growth line as a July self-report, attributed the Q1 2026 revenue and utilisation figure to Messari, and added September 2026 provider-stability issues. Scores unchanged.
2026-10-04	Data	N/A	Added Proposal 341 (passed 25 September 2026, read from the chain’s gov module): a 230,557.40 AKT community-pool spend to the Akash foundation for oracle price relayers through June 2027. Scores unchanged.
2026-09-25	Data	N/A	Dropped “Homenode is a decentralising force” from the Infrastructure rationale: AEP-60, a design spec, specifies that the core team runs provider control nodes. The score never counted Homenode. Infrastructure 12/20 held.
2026-09-24	Data	N/A	Governance proposals corrected from 300-plus to the chain’s 163; repo count updated to 70-plus; demand concentration restated to our lease reads (one payer 72.5%), with the AkashML attribution credited to an outside X thread; the 388.5M genesis figure relabelled a target; Q1 compute spend attributed to Akash. Scores unchanged.
2026-09-24	Data	N/A	Homenode moved from early access to open beta on 10 Aug 2026, adding RTX 3090s and Windows and Linux installers. Noted that AEP-60 runs home GPUs as worker nodes inside core-team providers, so it adds capacity inside existing providers. Scores unchanged.
2026-09-23	Data	N/A	Integrity records re-cut: 5 claims now quote Akash’s own pages verbatim and 10 are our own measurements. Scores unchanged.
2026-09-07	Data	N/A	WS3b consensus rail: the consensus layer under the Nodekeeper and jurisdiction arguments was never measured. Five colluding validators exceed a third of stake and under a third of supply is bonded. Censorship 10/15 held, anchored.
2026-09-05	Data	N/A	§8e sweep. The AkashML throughput series (5B to 10B tokens/day, May to July 2026) was asserting a continuing trend on a self-reported source last checked in July; re-anchored as a dated claim.
2026-08-13	Data	N/A	Our own chain read caught a stale figure of ours: Proposal 322 (15 May 2026) halved the inflation ceiling to 4% and raised the community pool tax to 70%, and the mint module returns 4.0% live. Corrected the inflation, community-tax and staking-yield figures across the page; Supply Dynamics and Revenue Sustainability flagged for the monthly review.
2026-08-13	Data	N/A	Migrated Akash onto the verdict spine and widened it: the four existing checks now anchor to Value Accrual, Revenue Sustainability and the demand thesis, plus new on-chain verdicts for supply, validator set, governance authority and open source.
2026-07-30	Editorial	N/A	Noted Akash’s 29 July 2026 confidential-compute launch (run a workload in a hardware-enforced TEE via one SDL line; Akash + Osuri on X) and the self-reported Console onboarding speed-up. No score change; the privacy gain is flagged for the Censorship Resistance dimension at the monthly review.
2026-07-26	Data	N/A	Checked an X thread’s Akash demand-concentration claim against our own LCD reads: the named AkashML wallets are heavy compute tenants topped up weekly from an exchange-like custody account, so demand is largely company-funded; the exact split and price correlation were not reproduced (reconciliation demand_source_concentration, unverifiable). No score change.
2026-07-26	Data	N/A	Reconciled Messari’s “53,520 AKT burned” against on-chain x/bme and the AEP-76 spec: it’s AKT pulled out of circulation into the BME vault, not destroyed. On-chain permanent burn = 0 (net burn only on price appreciation between top-up and payout). Recharacterised “burned” as a circulating-supply reduction across the page. No score change.
2026-07-26	Data	N/A	BME execution nuance: on-chain AKT leases run the automated AEP-76 loop, but card and fiat revenue (AkashML) is converted to AKT manually off-chain via Coinbase (Osuri, 24 June 2026, verified on X). Sharpened the Value Accrual and Tokenomics wording; the “every dollar routes through an on-chain market buy” framing was too strong. No score change.
2026-07-05	Editorial	N/A	Added a “The product in practice” section (per specs/product-comparison-framework.md) from our review, AKT_akash.json and r/akashnetwork; the demand story is AkashML managed inference (throughput growing, verified on X) wrapped around a small raw GPU marketplace, with Osuri’s energy thesis as the vision. No score change.
2026-08-03	Data	N/A	Added Mainnet 18 (11 June 2026, activated block #27230465) to the upgrade lineage: Oracle v2 (timestamp-based price-feed staleness detection, building on AEP-80) and Resource Reclamation (AEP-82, auto-closes idle leases). Supply-neutral; no score change.
2026-05-26	Data	N/A	Q1 2026 refresh from Messari “State of Akash Network Q1 2026” report (May 15, 2026, data as of 31 March 2026, primarily sourced from Akashstats + Artemis). Added independent figures with “as of” anchors and source attribution for evergreen reading: lease revenue $253,250 (-45% QoQ), 58 average active providers (lowest in network history), 33.7% GPU utilisation (not 60% as previously cited), 8.94% annualised inflation (not 8%), 53,520 AKT burned through BME in first nine days. Corrected Mainnet 16 vs Mainnet 17 attribution (Mainnet 16 = Tachyon security fix + store migration; Mainnet 17 = BME activation + AEPs 76/78/80/81). Added Akash Agents platform (26 March 2026) and Homenode early-access details (25 February 2026, RTX 4090/5090/Quadro RTX 6000 Ada). Revenue gap between Akash-reported ~$5M Q1 compute spend and Messari $253K Q1 lease revenue retained side-by-side per the dual-attribution decision. No score change; score boundaries are not crossed but several dimensions are flagged for reassessment at the next monthly review (Returns Sustainability if Akash publishes a reconciliation; Freedom Infrastructure if provider count stabilises post-BME).
2026-05-03	Editorial	N/A	Revenue figure refresh: Q1 2026 compute spend hit $5M ATH per Akash’s own data, prior $3.15M annual figure was stale. Cosmos licensing dispute (16 April 2026, Greg Osuri public statement) added to chain migration discussion as material new risk. No score change yet; June review will reassess Returns Sustainability and Freedom Open Source dimensions if migration timeline accelerates.
2026-05-03	Data	N/A	Removed hardcoded circulating supply figure from prose. Live figure now served by CirculatingSupply component (CoinGecko).
2026-04-06	Returns	62 → 68	BME live on-chain 23 March 2026. Value Accrual 10→14 (functioning burn mechanism). Supply Dynamics 12→14 (effective inflation reduced to ~7.1%).
2026-03-07	Returns	66 → 62	Returns methodology v2.0 correction. Revenue sustainability 18→14 (revenue-to-emission ratio below 0.5; prior score overstated).
2026-03-02	Both	n/a	Initial publish. Freedom 66/100, Returns 66/100.