Akash Network

Akash Network is a decentralized peer-to-peer marketplace for cloud computing solutions. The company's platform offers users open and secure protocols for cloud infrastructure, simplified code deployment, and managed workloads and provides a federated control plane for enterprises, software-as-a-service companies, and software developers to deploy applications. The company's platform uses underutilized capacity with on-premise and co-located data centers repurposed to host containerized applications. The company's platform also allows users to buy and sell excess cloud capacity from any provider, including providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.

Akash Network's platform offers a decentralized cloud computing marketplace that pools and reallocates idle computing processing powers to customers, allowing clients to list idle resources through a distributed leasing service developed to be transparent and preserves decentralized computation through the Akash blockchain. The protocol is designed to be flexible and allow providers to earn profits from unused capacity. And to accelerate the deployment, scale, productivity, and price execution for industries such as blockchain and machine learning.

Through a virtualization process, the containerized compute resources are leased to "tenants" who purchase the cloud services. The "providers" of the compute resources bid on the requests after they are validated as orders, and the lowest bid for the requested resources wins the lease. This scheme is developed to provide a financial incentive for participants to the network, with providers earning for otherwise idle resources while offering users lower costs for cloud computing resources.

The Akash Network blockchain uses a delegated proof-of-stake (DPOS) consensus mechanism, which relies on a network of validators and delegators. The validators are responsible for committing new blocks to the blockchain through a vote and use tokens staked by delegators. Delegators stake their tokens to chosen validators based on information provided on the platform. The network uses the Tendermint algorithm for interoperability between blockchains. Akash Network has also developed and launched an inter-blockchain communication relayer to enable communication and cooperation between various blockchain protocols.

The Akash Network uses a utility token, the AKT token, to help secure the network through staking and to serve as the network's default currency across the ecosystem. This offers a native medium of transferring and storing value on the network. There was an initial supply, released with Akash Network's mainnet 1.0 released in September 2020, of 100,000,000 tokens with a maximum supply of 388,539,008 AKT. Those initial tokens were divided among investors and the Akash Network team, but the project underwent public sales with the goal of around 75 percent of the maximum supply distributed as network rewards.