Cosmos Ecosystem and the role of Akash Network in the future of cloud computing

This article is a summary of an interview conducted by Liam Connor and the founder of Akash Network. You can see the original video at this link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0zdmLSPPRkU&feature=youtu.be (and I really suggest you to do so).

Seeing founders excited for their project is something wonderful for any investor. Investing is about people… even investing into crypto, where often its not only the founders, but also the community. Both play a huge role in the long-run. Let's dive into the summary.

Greg Osuri's take on Cosmos ecosystem

Cosmos is slowly getting the recognition it deserves. The whole ecosystem of IBC chains is a one big community., which is super easy to use, with diverse spectrum of applications and projects. Ethereum onboarded the first hundreds millions to crypto — Cosmos will onboard the first billion users. Many celebritites, like NBA-star Mitch Richmond, are using Cosmos right now, because of its UX and safety. Cosmos ecosystem is the definition of evolution of crypto — crypto was purely speculative, but has evolved into something really innovative (Web3). Cosmos will succeed in the long-term and will be 10x bigger than Ethereum.

What is Akash and how does it fit into the whole Cosmos ecosystem?

Akash is distributed peer-to-peer marketplace for cloud compute that currently hosts almost 600 applications. The project is 9 months old. It is a “de-definition” of cloud — anybody can provide computing power in open, permissionless, sovereign and decentralized way. Why is this important in the long-term? Cloud computing is an utility (same as electricity, water etc.), but with a twist — it actually stores user's data. Additionally, centralized providers (such as AWS or Google Cloud) have a lot of downtimes, which cause many problems. This is possible because the market is in a state of an oligopoly, which can have inefficiences (since it's an oligopoly). Free market palce would allow a greater diversity and supply. Akash wants to be THE marketplace for unused compute (which is in fact the majority of computing power in existence). The best analogy for Akash would be a Airbnb of cloud compute — Akash's marketplace will allow for great diversity and variety of options to choose from (same as when you go to Airbnb), because individuals will be able to host and lease their computing power.

Akash in IBC and Cosmos ecosystem

Akash was the first chain that launched on IBC, which allowed it to be THE main cloud provider for many projects in the ecosystem — Osmosis, Stargate, Juno, Chihuaha, Strange Clan and others. IBC projects can pay directly in their own unit of account through Osmosis DEX, which allows for much higher efficiency. Plus, Akash is much, much cheaper than the traditional providers. Akash will benefit from the growth of the whole ecosystem, which will be massive in the near future, and will use its connections and partnerships to service more projects. The community of the Cosmos ecosystem is (and will continue) benefiting Akash and other projects very much. Akash wants to put emphasis on service approach and help with onboarding of developers with a frictionless, self-sovereign cloud and compute provision experience accross the whole stack: from early development to launches of testnet and mainnet. Sort of a production support for new chains and projects that want to launch on IBC — saving time and work for the new founders. There shouldn't be fights and competitions between new founders and “old” founders — they both should rather focus on solving advanced and critical problems.

The future of Akash — tokenomics, decentralization, functionability and usability

Akash is becoming more and more decentralized. No proposal on-chain was ever proposed by the team and the team does not have the voting majority anymore (this is also true for most of the Cosmos ecosystem projects). Tokenomics are going to improve as well. The high inflationary model was not meant to be a passive income generator — it was meant to be a reward for the early investors. There is a fixed total supply, a hard cap. Selling your rewards means you are lowering your portion of the pie. More importantly, Akash will become deflationary in the future. The team has again leveraged their partnerships throughout the Cosmos ecosystem and is preparing LUNA-like burning mechanism. The rationale behind this idea is the fact that the volatile AKT token is great for securing the network (Akash is a Proof-of-Stake), great for incentivizing users, but not good as medium of exchange. There needs to be some sort of stablecoin (not necessarily pegged to USD or any other fiat currency), which will be minted by burning AKT for it.

“Akash is Subaru — a great car, a great machine functioning very well… but it does not look good. And that's also a goal — to look beautifully as well. It doesn't make sense to put a lipstick on a pig.”

At the moment, Akash is very easy to use to do hard things on, but very hard to do simple things on. The main focus of Akash is the container hosting functioning well — the basics and foundations of the platform. This composability, functionability, and stability has been traded-off for lower level of usability. It is being finished and 2022 will be the time to focus on “becoming beautiful” — being user-friendly, simple to use…which is necessary for mainstream adoption. Akash should be on the same level as AWS, Google Cloud and others in terms of services providing by the end of 2022. No more managing databases by yourself. Simple things such as using WordPress or using JavaScript will be easy to do on Akash as well. Command line, which is now the biggest weakness of Akash, will be improved, because the foundations has been built. To ease the “financial” part of bulding a new project, Akash is also creating something called escrow account — which will allow for decoupling payments from operations (developers will be able to use only the tool chain and not deal with payments at all).

Goals?

According to Greg, the cloud infrastructure market will be a trillion dollar market by 2025. Akash is now in position to serve the market with a developers- and users-first approach. In the next 3–5 years, the goal is to “steal” 1% of the total market share. This will be achieved by having a services marketplace and container composability put into a Akash economy and marketplace powered by the AKT token, while being more than half cheaper than the centralized competition. How? Because there is a massive amount of unused compute power and GPU power, which could be used. Gaming machines, Apple Macs with M1 Chips, old ETH PoW nodes — all of this could be used. You could even lease out your computer only while you sleep. The plans are big.

TLDR of the future development? GPU providing launch; unique IPs, which will allow Akash to help Solana with scaling, launch; persistent storage launch; services marketplace (allowing mainstream adoption and bumping up the usability) launch; storage providing on mainnet; new tokenomics; marketplace and economy powered by AKT; more decentralizing; emphasis on the community, partnerships and moving forward.