The Future of Decentralized Cloud Computing, Featuring Greg Osuri of Akash Network
The Bit Podcast — Episode 25
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This week on The Bit, we’re joined by Greg Osuri, CEO of Akash Network, to speak about a world where cloud computing is permissionless, sovereign, and open, where and where builders of the internet have greater freedom to expand the human experience.
Here are the show notes:
[5:35] Akash Network Vision
[16:41] The Competition
[27:50] California and Blockchain
[33:29] Widespread Adoption
[40:49] The Future of Akash
Chris Sinkey: Hi, welcome to The Bit, the Bittrex Global podcast, where we give you the inside scoop on all things crypto. My name is Chris Sinkey, and I’m the Chief Business Officer at Bittrex Global. Even though the idea behind cryptocurrency and blockchain systems emerged a little over a decade ago, the ecosystem has grown so exponentially and so rapidly that sometimes it’s hard to keep track of all the innovation going on around the space. Akash Network is a perfect example of this, with a mission to transition cloud computing from a centralized model to a decentralized system.
Akash Network is showing us the benefits of what a decentralized cloud computing world can look like, faster, more flexible, and lower cost. So to help us get a better grip on Akash Network and its mission to bridge the gap and link cloud computing to the blockchain, I’m speaking today with the co-founder and CEO of Akash Network, Greg Osuri, who brings a wealth of experience in open source development and cloud computing. So Greg, welcome to The Bit; we’re excited to be chatting with you today. We’d love to learn all about you and your background.
Greg Osuri: Thanks so much, Chris, for that kind introduction and for having me. To simply put it, I build things for people that build things. I’ve been a programmer for a little over 25 years, in which the last 13 years, I was primarily building and shipping developer tooling. I founded a company called Angel Hack to take hackathons to masses in 2013.
I helped launch a few companies, the most notable one being Firebase, which eventually got acquired by Google. My passion for helping developers succeed led me to founding a company, Overclock Labs. The goal was to solve a very critical problem — make your applications available to users in a frictionless and scalable way.
The overwhelming problem back then, even now, happened to be that you could have a scalable infrastructure, but it was not easy to use, or it was easy to use, but it wasn’t scalable. So that was a mission for Overclock Labs. As we were deploying the solution to various customers in their data centers, we discovered another big problem: underutilization. So, it turns out; most compute around 85% of compute that sits in data centers remains unused.
That’s when the idea of unlocking this unused compute and making it available to users in the same frictionless way, came about and that’s the genesis for Akash Network. Five years later, here we are, with hyper-growth and a highly usable product.
Chris Sinkey: I love it. Thanks for that background. Very interesting, and I think we’re going to get into a great discussion today about the trends shaping the broader crypto space. Also, the future of cloud computing, and a particular interest, of course, is where Akash Network fits into that equation. But right off the bat, I got to do a plug for Bittrex Global and let everybody know that AKT, the ticker name of Akash Network’s token, is listed on Bittrex Global and Bittrex Global did integrate the mainnet of Akash Network.
So for any of those that are interested in trading it, Bittrex Global is one more place where you can do that. Before we dig into the broader trends and the next question on the list, we like to ask all of our guests this question: how did you get into crypto in the first place? How did you hear about it? When did you buy your first token? I know you talked about it a little bit already, but the first entry into Crypto is always a fun story.
Greg Osuri: My first entry to crypto was around 2012. Around that timeframe, I bought Bitcoin as a utility to pay for things, and those things ended up being the most expensive things I ever bought. It was a hell of a party. But more seriously, I think, in 2016, we took the red pill. Before that, we experimented; as I mentioned, I founded Overclock Labs to make scalable infrastructure easy to use.
The applications we were designing were an extremely fast infrastructure by going to the edge, so we call it edge computing. One of the technical challenges for edge computing was to ensure the configuration data was consistent across all the edge data centers. We had to choose a data structure that was very similar to a Merkle tree, and it’s synced using a BitTorrent style replication mechanism. So when you put a BitTorrent and Merkle tree together, you end up with a blockchain.
So that’s really how we started getting into the early days of blockchain in 2016. And we formalized the blockchain as a core data structure in 2017. So to answer your question, we got into blockchain out of necessity to solve an edge computing data consistency problem. The token on top of the blockchain came because of our foray into proof-of-stake.
And my background as an economist made me realize that we can conduct experiments in a micro-climate. We can use the monetary sovereignty benefits that crypto provides to bootstrap networks like Akash to form the foundation.
[5:35] Akash Network Vision
Chris Sinkey: And so, for some of our listeners that might not be that familiar with Akash, and you’ve talked a little bit already about what Akash is, can you succinctly describe the vision for Akash and what you’re trying to do?
Greg Osuri: To simply put, a little history lesson, right? So if you look back at why the internet was created, the internet was created as a solution to the centralization problem, which was threatened by the Cold War, right. So the idea of having built a communications network that does not have a center was a novel idea in the 60s, and that gave birth to the internet. But somewhere down the line, the internet became extremely centralized, protected by gatekeepers. And today, if you look at the landscape, over 80% of the cloud infrastructure, which is the backbone for the internet, is controlled by four companies, and Amazon is the biggest one.
And the outcome is behavior by these companies that may or may not be aligned with the general public. More importantly, when you have so much power concentrated into a single entity, like Amazon, I think it poses a major threat to civil liberties. So, the outcome and we see what happens when you have so much concentration of power, one of the outcomes is censorship, right. Whatever side of the political spectrum you fall under, the fact that there is a single company that has so much power over civil liberties is concerning. So, on top of that, when you have few companies operating what could be considered as one of the most critical layers of our society, which is a cloud, you end up with inefficiencies. Oligopolies tend to give inefficiencies, and they also tend to create competitive modes for newcomers that prevent newcomers from participating in what is supposed to be a competitive economy.
The mission for Akash is to decentralize, break this oligopoly using a novel mechanism wherein people, the community of users, are in charge or in control. So Akash, by definition, is a decentralized cloud that is censorship-resistant, self-sovereign, and permissionless. A core of this decentralized cloud is a cluster of computers spread across Cloud grid computers that offer cloud-like, if not better features, that the current cloud operators provide at a significantly lower cost, which is driven by the market. Also, the experience is so much more centered around the user, which is the developer. So, Akash is a modern, open, developer-first, cost-optimized cloud.
The best analogy I can give: Akash is like Airbnb of computing, wherein Amazon is like Hilton. I’m saying that because the computing behind the Akash Network does not come from a single provider or a single company but rather comes from a globally distributed network of cloud-grade data centers. At the same time, you look at something like Amazon, where they own all their data centers and price accordingly. With Amazon, you get this consistency, like, just like how you will get with Hilton. Whereas with Akash, you get this variety, just like how you would get with Airbnb.
Chris Sinkey: Very interesting. And Akash Network recently celebrated a very important milestone, is that right? The launch of MAINNET 2 back in March?
Greg Osuri: Correct. That was seven months ago.
Chris Sinkey: And then what’s the growth and demand for Akash Network look like since then?
Greg Osuri: So since we launched seven months ago, we have 30,000 deployments, application deployments, and over 450 active applications currently running on Akash. We registered a triple-digit growth month over a month till about last month.
We were actually doubling in terms of live applications coming online on the Akash Network. Akash Network is generating revenue; we hit, I believe, $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue for a six-month project. I believe Zack yesterday from Yahoo Finance called Akash as an Amazon competitor that’s growing faster than Amazon. So that’s where we are.
Chris Sinkey: Oh, wow, that well, that sounds pretty impressive, to say the least. I have to watch that interview.
Greg Osuri: Thank you.
Chris Sinkey: And you’ve got something called the Akashlytics Dashboard; is that right?
Greg Osuri: Correct.
Chris Sinkey: Is that publicly facing?
Greg Osuri: That is publicly facing. I believe they’re making some modifications, and I believe the data may not be accurate. Still, we will be launching our own dashboard on the 28th of October, which is coming up, so we should have an official Akash Network dashboard. We have a few other community-managed dashboards — Akashlytics being one.
Chris Sinkey: Got it. So it’s kind of a community-managed block explorer for Akash Network, more or less analytics overlay?
Greg Osuri: Yeah, deployment analytics dashboard, I would say. We have a few other block explorers that don’t track deployments; there is MintScan, there’s Aneka and a few others.
Chris Sinkey: Are there any other applications that are sort of community-built and managed, or any that the Akash team has built and continues to manage that our users might be interested in interacting with?
Greg Osuri: Several actually. Akash takes a community-first approach. We have community build applications, more applications than then Akash team. The core team is responsible for building and maintaining, along with other participants across different companies, that the core technology, but most of the applications come from the community. If you want to understand the full extent of the applications Akash Network hosts, I recommend checking out something called Awesome Akash — it is on our GitHub.
You will see hundreds of different applications that are built on Akash, and the most notable one running on Akash is Osmosis. Osmosis is a decentralized exchange for the Cosmos ecosystem. It is the premium decentralized Exchange, which now hosts Terra and I believe has about half a billion dollars TVL. Itt’s running on Akash. Another very interesting application that we have seen a lot of momentum in is NFT’s and games. So there is a new game called Strange Clan that was launched a few weeks ago.
This is running exclusively on Akash, and those are some of the fun things that you can do right now on Akash. Of course, there are many other applications that people are running from mining or whatnot, but I would say Osmosis and Strange Clan are my two favorite things.
Chris Sinkey: Okay, I’ll have to check those out. And when it comes to the token, AKT, what’s the technology that is based on? Or did you guys open source it from scratch? Is it proof-of-stake? A fork?
Greg Osuri: Akasha is a sovereign blockchain. It is an independent blockchain that’s secured by its own set of validators in a proof of stake scheme, where the AKT token provides the security for the blockchain as a primary purpose. The AKT token is also the token that people use to pay for hosting on the AKASH network, and it is a token that providers use to receive payment.
As a staking token, Akash, AKT has incentives that are very attractive for stakers to secure the blockchain, and the incentive is staking rewards, which is north of 45% to 50% APR. When you compound that, I believe it’s somewhere around 70 to 80%. Akash token is also a highly liquid token, especially on decentralized exchanges like Osmosis, wherein you can provide liquidity for further incentives. I believe Osmosis is offering around 130% to 150% APR. Compound that again is like 200%+ APY. The other blockchains and other decentralized exchanges like Sifchain offers north of 200% APR.
The primary purpose of AKT token is to secure the blockchain and be used as a medium of exchange in the Akash Network, which is doing very healthy. There are also secondary income generating or passive income-generating opportunities by application such as Osmosis, or Sifchain.
Chris Sinkey: That’s great. I was just going to ask you what the utility use cases were for AKT, and you went right into it and just not knocked that out. So that’s really great to hear that it not only secures the network, but you’ve got active use cases for AKT right now.
The APR sounds amazing. Do you worry a little bit about supply overhang and downside pressure on the price with an APR that high? Where do you think the APR will go over the next year or two.
Greg Osuri: So the APR is on a decay curve. So it comes down every block period every six seconds. Akash is a fixed supply token — there are 389 million tokens ever in existence that will take another 80 years by the time you see full supply being reached, and the APR is essentially a way to unlock that supply.
The way Akash holders look at the APR is really an opportunity to acquire and hold on to AKT tokens because as the APR gets less meaningful, you may not have the same opportunity that you have right now. So the idea behind the staking rewards is to create incentives for folks to stake the network, which in turn security network. So there’s a proposed idea where a percentage of the hosting fees paid to the network goes back to the stakers.
The economy is designed to give ample amount of time or sufficient time for Akash adoption to catch up, which is an amazing growth curve, as you can see, and hopefully come to an equilibrium with the staking rewards.
[16:41] The Competition
Chris Sinkey: That’s great. Let’s transition to talking about competition. Other storage-based projects in the space or super computer-based projects in the space like SONM, Golem, and Siacoin — what do you think sets Akash apart from that group? How would you frame the differentiation?
Greg Osuri: Sure. Let’s break down the space a little bit. Akash is not a storage platform; it is a distributed computation platform. What that means is Akash can provide storage that’s ephemeral in nature, meaning the storage goes away once your lease with a provider ends. So, you’re responsible for ensuring that you have backups, and where do you back this up? On another decentralized storage network like Sia or FileCoin. Each of them offers different value propositions.
Akash works in complement with the storage networks. Similarly, with other layers in the decentralized, or DWS space, the decentralized web services, where you have Handshake as your primary DNS resolver or even ENS domains, then you have compute layer, which is Akash, and you have other specialized compute providers like Livepeer. Even iExec is very different. iExec only does background jobs, whereas Akash can do full applications. Akash can host, for example, a database or s WordPress website, whereas iExec cannot.
The iExec model is similar to Ethereum, where the user pays the gas fees, whereas the Akash model is similar to AWS, where the developer pays for hosting. Completely different things. But iExec is a specialized compute provider.
Then you have something like storage. Like I said, with FileCoin and Sia, you have potentially key management services. A lot of these services that you’re used to in the Web 2.0 world provided by big cloud are getting decentralized, in this new category called DWS. Akash is an important player because with Akash, users can compose different decentralized cloud networks and leverage using computational composability.
So without competition, you cannot use Handshake directly with the FileCoin today. In order to use it, you need Akash. Akash is this glue that brings all these decentralized networks together.
Chris Sinkey: Well, you answered my next question already, but I’ll ask it again, just to make sure that we covered it all, which is: How exactly does Akash link the cloud to the blockchain? And how does this fit into today’s old-world cloud ecosystem?
Greg Osuri: Yeah, and I actually get into more examples. We see quite a bit of Sia, Skynet used with Akash, and I really like Skynet. Akash doesn’t do long-term storage — any storage you do on Akash is short-lived. So, say you want to do a decentralized WordPress.
What you normally do is host the WordPress application and the MySQL server on Akash, back up MySQL database onto Skynet, connect the WordPress application, the Apache webserver to Handshake,, and maybe even use DVP or Sentinel to automatically resolve handshake. So you can use dVPN, which is a decentralized VPN, to automatically resolve your domain name running on Handshake, which connects to Akash, wherein the Akash data that you’ve stored is backed up to Skynet.
That’s just one example of how people use Akash and other protocols. Another great example I saw the other day, I’m not sure if you know about this protocol called Radicle, but Radicle is trying to decentralize GitHub. GitHub is owned by Microsoft and heavily centralized, and they are known for their censorship.
So GitHub Pages, for example, is used by a lot of DeFi projects to host their front ends. That is a big threat to our existence as a decentralized Web 3.0 future. So Radicle is trying to decentralize GitHub, but does not have GitHub pages. So, if someone built an application where you can push your code to Radicle, and your code, if you have a website, will automatically get deployed onto Akash, and now you have a full-on decentralized version of GitHub Pages.
Those are some of the examples the community has come up with and are using, and I’m a big fan of this new application — I’m going to host the source code now on Radicle and use this amazing mechanism to keep updating my website. What we’re noticing here is a birth of a new class of web 3.0 services called DWS that’s actually gaining adoption, and making money, as it’s gaining adoption. So I’m really excited to partake in this phenomenal revolution.
Chris Sinkey: Can you give us a rundown of where the decentralized cloud computing space currently stands and what might be in store for the future down the road?
Greg Osuri: The industry is expected to be worth $800 billion by 2028. I think that’s the estimated number right now. It’s about $380 billion — t’s humongous. It’s a trillion-dollar market, and it’s controlled by four companies — Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Alibaba. Amazon has about 300 services that people use. In order for the DWS to be competitive with Amazon, DWS needs to offer these services, and we don’t have those services.
Chris Sinkey: And DWS, you mean decentralized web services, right?
Greg Osuri: Decentralized web services — that’s a category.
Chris Sinkey: I just wanted to clarify that for the listeners just to make sure that they knew.
Greg Osuri: I’m not too sure who coined the term, but it’s a new term that’s been coined, which is a replacement for decentralized replacement for Amazon Web Services that Akash is a part of. So, Messari wrote a report recently called The Dawn of Web3 Network Revenue. There’s a website called web3index.org — I highly recommend you check it out. It tracks revenue and real progress for a lot of these networks.
Not the staking rewards or none of the extra stuff these networks offer, but the actual usage revenue. So you’ll see that there are about six services that are actually making money, offering real valuable services to users that could be on Amazon but chose not to and are instead using the DWS services. So that’s just an indication that we have reached product-market fit to a certain degree, and we are currently in the growth stage. So, the product-market fit stage is one of the biggest hurdles that DWS had, and now we kind of crossed that.
The big challenge is how do we grow? How do we grow to the $800 billion industry by 2020? By focusing on important things. So a big missing piece right now is developer experience — interoperability. So I think, without investments in IBC or inter-blockchain communication, we can solve a lot of the inefficiencies in the next year or so. So, the big challenge right now is just getting all these protocols working in a cohesive way, where the user can pay using a single token. So, big emphasis on user experience.
Chris Sinkey: We can’t have a crypto-themed podcast in 2021 without bringing up DeFi to shift the subject a little bit. So what is Akash Network’s position on DeFi? Are there any plans to integrate it, specifically DeFi applications onto the platform?
Greg Osuri: Well, Osmosis, which is one of the biggest, fastest-growing decentralized exchanges, is running on Akash. Sifchain announced plans to move to Akash. We have seen quite a bit of different applications moving to Akash, and I believe Polygon announced plans, and there’s going to be some exciting stuff to move Akash.
So, we’ve seen quite a bit of DeFi adoption, and I think the trigger for that is heavy regulation. So the idea is if you can remove the corporation out of the way, and when you have a DAO-controlled website, that’s a lot more decentralized than what we’re seeing these days. When you have DAOs, control websites, Amazon is not really an option. Because you have to elect somebody in the DAO that has to pay using their credit card.
The best possible solution for a DAO to host data service is Akash, wherein you can control using a key, ideally multisig. So Akash is providing decentralized data services for DAOs, and a lot of the DeFi is moving to DAOs, and that’s why they’re choosing Akash Network as their hosting platform.
So I think this new evolution of DeFi 2.0, which is driven by DAO and, a lot of the DeFi 2.0 projects actually have DAO controlled treasuries, and now they will have DAO controlled data services and Akash. So we were working with a few amazing platforms, and you’re going to see a lot more announcements in the next few weeks about our progress here.
Chris Sinkey: You mentioned Cosmos a couple of times, and you just mentioned Polygon — what’s the connection between the two? What makes Akash Network attractive to those platforms?
Greg Osuri: I don’t know if you know that Polygon is a fork of Cosmos hub.
Chris Sinkey: I did not know that that’s interesting.
Greg Osuri: It is a fork of Cosmos SDK. They’ve changed quite a bit now, but they began as a fork. They did a lot more work on top of the fork, and I don’t think it’s any longer a Cosmos SDK base chain, but the operational schematics are very similar to the Cosmos SDK chain. So, we are working with Polygon to offer the ecosystem a decentralized cloud hosting option, which is critical now.
We’re potentially also announcing a few other plans that you’ll soon find out about in a week or so. There’s a lot of excitement that’s happening — I can’t really talk about it right now. I want to keep the surprise fresh.
[27:50] California and Blockchain
Chris Sinkey: Yeah, keep the surprise fresh. Keep us on our toes, and we’ll look forward to those announcements. Thanks for answering that question. Segwaying into the next subject, it’s definitely slightly off-topic, but I don’t think we could let you leave the podcast without having you share your role in getting California’s first blockchain law passed. Can you give us a behind-the-scenes look at how everything played out there?
Greg Osuri: Yes. This was in 2018. Crypto was crazy. We were just trying to get the attention of the regulators. Right now, we have too much attention, which is, you know, whatever. But back then, regulators or lawmakers really didn’t want to touch anything crypto. I felt it was very important to get some of the core definitions into California law, considering California is home to the most innovative companies.
So me along with an early supporter of Akash, we helped propose a few amendments to the Privacy and Consumer Protection Act of 2018 to include the definition of blockchain, the definition of smart contract into the law so that we can have the foundation we can build upon for further legislation for crypto.
It was modeled after the Wyoming Bill, and Wyoming is one of the first states to actually make quite a bit of progress. Now that we have the foundation for the California blockchain legislation, we can build amazing legislation that uses the foundation. So it was at a time, and when nobody wanted to talk about crypto in the legislative sphere, we took the first step, and hopefully, that helped quite a bit further along to make crypto legitimate.
Chris Sinkey: I applaud your work in that space. I think we all do at Bittrex Global. As somebody working for a centralized exchange for the past four years, I can tell you I’ve witnessed firsthand the difficulties in working with regulators to help them understand what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and why it’s important for the world.
We’ve been targets. The Fiat on-ramps are a major source of regulatory attention. Every user on Bittrex Global has to go through KYC, and we comply with AML regulations around the world. We actually segregated our userbase in 2019. There’s Bittrex US, and then there’s a Bittrex Global, and that’s the company that I work for now. And that company’s headquartered out of Liechtenstein and only accepts non-US customers.
Part of that is the security laws and the differences between them. Unfortunately, there’s so much discrepancy between whole regions of the world and how they treat cryptocurrency. The one thing I hope the US gets right is a safe harbor for many of these projects that are going from zero to utility token status.
They’ve got that ramp in Europe, but they don’t in the US yet. So anyway, that’s my regulation plug. Sorry to take it off a tangent, but something that I think would be really important for the industry and US adoption.
Greg Osuri:
You brought up a very important point called Safe Harbor Commissioner Hester Peirce actually proposed an amazing piece of the framework that’s actually blogged about on our website in 2019. Commissioner Peirce really proposed a comprehensive framework for new tokens to graduate from what they considered securities at the beginning to more commodities, including various disclosure requirements, including various progress support, and some technical requirements, like providing a block explorer, and whatnot.
Those are some of the things that we are doing anyway. Still, it would be great for SEC to adopt that as a more formal framework and give some regulatory clarity, especially to young companies and networks like Akash, as to where we stand. Still, unfortunately, the regulatory situation is that they’re taking enforcement instead of clarity.
Enforcement first approach is very hostile to our industry, but our industry is known for mobilizing. I think in the end, it’s going to be great, we’re all going to make it, but in the short-term, the mid-term, I don’t think it’s going to be very pleasing. Short-term pain for long-term gain.
[33:29] Widespread Adoption
Chris Sinkey: Yeah, and in my mind, Ethereum was really the poster child for that Safe Harbor concept. That graduation from security to a utility token, with Ethereums initial coin offering clearly a security in the eyes of US regulators, but now very decentralized and distributed around the world. It’s absolutely a utility token — it’s a commodity. So, let’s segue into the next question, which is around adoption.
As the space as cryptocurrency continues to grow and mature, we’re seeing so many interesting projects come onto the scene that they’re trying to tackle and solve different problems and improve efficiencies in every corner of our economy. But a lot of these projects can be very difficult for the average person to wrap their head around and use. So, from your perspective, what do you think needs to be done to accelerate mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency in the blockchain?
Greg Osuri: Good question.
Chris Sinkey: And the second piece of that is, what does Akash Network do to target and educate new users and get new users into the network and drive adoption?
Greg Osuri: Yeah, it’s a loaded question — lots of things are happening.
Chris Sinkey: It is. Our community likes to ask loaded questions, what can I say. But it’s an interesting one for me too — I’m very curious about your response to this?
Greg Osuri: If you look at the work so far that’s being done, it is mostly from an infrastructure standpoint. So building the infrastructure, the Layer-1s, the Layer-2s, and the sovereign chains to support an adoption that can expand. So, we are slowly graduating from the infrastructure focus to application focus with DeFi and NFT’s.
NFTs really opened up quite a different perspective that I realized very recently, especially talking to more traditional Web2 founders and Web2 participants — they’re all doing NFT’s now. When people talk about NFTs, they don’t talk about blockchain. So I think we are starting to see the shift of mainstream adoption, especially with NFTs, and it’s not anymore “if” we’re going to have mainstream; it’s about “when” we go mainstream, and it’s starting to happen in ways that we never anticipated before.
So, of course, we built infrastructure first, and now we are building the applications. If you look at Axie Infinity, I think they did billions of dollars in quarterly revenue. If you look at OpenSea, it did $10 billion in GMV. This quarter, that’s a clear indication that there’s quite a bit of mainstream demand for these applications.
Chris Sinkey: Opensea did $10 billion in quarterly GMV?
Greg Osuri: I believe so. It could be monthly. Don’t quote me on the actual timeframe; it’s for sure less than a quarter. I can sit here and predict what needs to be done, but ultimately it’ll be something like NFTs — the whole, make it mainstream. I never saw the coming of NFTs like what they have right now. But I think fundamentally, it’s infrastructure. It’s really hard for someone to self custody their tokens.
Custody is only as good as a person holding it. So, if I talk to someone like my dad, he would hate holding his tokens, because he’s afraid that he might lose them. So, from an on-ramp and off-ramp standpoint, I think there’s a lot of infrastructure that needs to be solved.
From a custody standpoint, that needs to be solved. From a wallet infrastructure standpoint, the wallets not using ledgers is not the best experience, so that needs to be solved. There are many problems that need to be solved for us to gain mainstream adoption. Even with these restrictions and friction points, we are seeing NFTs explode — it’s a two-pronged approach.
One is verticalization, where you have NFTs and DeFi attracting a lot more mainstream users — DeFi attracting traditional finance users and NFT’s attracting traditional collector users to improve the core infrastructure to support these verticals. So there’s a lot of work both horizontally and vertically that needs to happen.
With Akash and what we’re doing, we are making about $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue. That was $0 6 months ago. That revenue is coming from developers hosting websites on Akash instead of hosting them on Amazon.
Why? Because Akash is a functioning and usable product. You don’t have the gas fee limitations two-pronged in Ethereum because Akash is a sovereign chain. If I build something on Ethereum, you’ll end up paying, let’s say, $70 every time you want to update your blog. So that’s not feasible.
With Akash, it’s less a 1/4 a cent for the gas fee. The reason for that is that whatever happens on Akash Network is only related to Akash Network functions and transactions and nothing else. We’re not a Layer-1. So the sovereign blockchains are an amazing way to scale. Similar economics are on an Osmosis.
Osmosis is a decentralized exchange for mostly Cosmos ecosystem tokens now, and the gas fees on that are free. It’s next to nothing. My parents actually use Osmosis. My sister uses Osmosis, and they all love it compared to using something like Uniswap.
So a lot of these problems are getting solved, slowly but surely. Something like Osmosis that was launched three months ago, has about half a billion dollars in TVL without an Ethereum bridge. That’s something to something to say for. Once these bridges come, I think their TVL is just going to explode. But, without a bridge, coming just from the Cosmos ecosystem, half a billion dollars in TVL is very usable.
It’s actually very pleasant if you use Osmosis. One of the beautiful things about crypto, in general, is the unified identity — I think that’s underrated, right? So I use something called Keplr as my browser base wallet for Akash, and I can use the same wallet to login to Osmosis. There’s not a single username, password, or email address. I get a form or a CAPTCHA I need to solve. If crypto solves the CAPTCHA problem, that alone is a good reason for mainstream adoption.
[40:49] The Future of Akash
Chris Sinkey: Yeah, I agree. For those listening on the phone, a couple of definitions. TVL stands for Total Value Locked in an ecosystem. And GMV stands for Gross Merchandising Value. I just wanted to make sure we weren’t losing people with our acronyms. So you talked about it a little bit earlier, but just to kind of wrap things up based on what you can share, what are the short and long-term visions that you have for Akash Network? Let’s say it’s six months, one year, five years?
Greg Osuri: Yeah, we published a roadmap recently, if you go to akash.network/roadmap, you’ll see a very detailed, thorough roadmap as to what we’re going to do in the short term in 2022. Right now, Akash is an amazingly usable platform, but it’s bare-bones. It can run these things called containers, where your application is completely packaged into this small, shippable unit called containers, and you can ship that to Akash, and Akash will run for you. But it’s bare bones.
A big challenge for Akash right now is you got to manage your infrastructure yourself. So the long-term vision by the end of 2022, we’re going to have a services marketplace where you do not need to manage a lot of infrastructure on Akash, but rather these infrastructures are managed by someone else in a decentralized way. As I said, Amazon has about 300 services. Akash will have a similar offering but with a lot more services because it’s decentralized and permissionless.
Once we can manage services, I think we’ll capture a significantly higher market share than Amazon is currently thriving on. Before that, we’re going to have GPUs. I’m really excited about GPUs because GPUs are the foundation for machine learning. Machine learning is extremely expensive on the cloud today. Almost on an annual basis, reports talk about how expensive it is to run machine learning or data-intensive workloads.
Look at public companies. The paperwork they file before going public, you’ll notice something like Snowflake, which spends about 50% of its margins on the cloud today, especially machine learning. So any optimization, even 10% to 20% reduction in that cloud bill, is a big deal for a lot of these companies.
The majority of the cloud bill is for machine learning. So we’re going to enable GPUs, and we’re going to offer them significantly lower. Why? Because there’s a ubiquitous amount of GPUs all around the world. Ethereum, moving from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, will free up enormous amounts of GPUs that have nowhere to go.
Apple announced its M1 plans. The new laptops, don’t quote me on this, but these are 24 core GPUs on them that are not being used most of the time. You’re going to have ubiquitous amounts of GPUs that are all over the spread across different computers all around the world.
And more interestingly, we’ve been having early conversations with autonomous vehicle manufacturers, and some of these AVs have six to seven GPUs on the car. These are T20 chips — they are very powerful GPUs that are not used when they’re being charged in the night. So those GPUs can go on Akash Network too.
So there are a lot of GPUs that can go on Akash Network. That’ll unlock machine learning and data-intensive workloads. Someone like Snowflake will be more than happy to save 10 to 20% on the 50% margin that they’re paying to Amazon. So I think that’s going to put Akash on a different plane altogether. I’m very excited about a lot of these technologies that you’ll soon see on Akash.
Chris Sinkey: When do you think Ethereum is going to actually move to proof-of-stake and free up those GPUs?
Greg Osuri: I think another nine months to a year’s time. It’s slowly happening, but it’s a gigantic decentralized network. I think at the end of the year, they will move away from proof-of-work.
Chris Sinkey: I think that’s a good segue into my last question for you, which is definitely more general and sort of away from Akash. But it’s something we’d like to ask everybody that comes on, which is, what are you excited about in the space regarding other projects or other cryptocurrencies that you’re watching that you think the audience should be paying attention to as well?
Greg Osuri: I want to say something, but I don’t want to get in trouble.
Chris Sinkey: No, you’re not going to get in trouble.
Greg Osuri: I’m very excited about Cosmos’ ecosystem. I think Cosmos’ ecosystem is probably the best-built ecosystem right after Ethereum that is not getting the attention it deserves. With some amazing projects like dVPN, Persistence, Terra, and Secret Network, I’m excited because Cosmos’ ecosystem enabled IBC, or inter blockchain communication. It’s the only ecosystem where you have multichain that’s fully functioning, secure, and composable, so I’m very excited.
There’s a website called map of zones — I highly recommend it. Check it out, and you can visualize all these different blockchains communicating with each other in an incredible way. So I’m very bullish on Cosmos’ ecosystem, and things that I’m super bullish that are not yet live are something like Strange Clan or NFTs; NFT gaming in particular. I think NFTs as collectibles are great. But, when you can use those collectibles in a productive way, I’m super bullish on that.
Another area I’m really excited about is cross-chain composability. Agoric is doing some amazing things. Mark Miller and Dean Tribble founded Agoric. Some history — they wrote these papers in the 1980s. Nick Szabo, the creator of smart contracts, used to work for these guys, Dean Tribble. So you certainly want to watch out for this team called Agoric.
They’re doing cross-chain composability, and these guys really know smart contracts in and out. So in another network called Juno Network, which is on Akash recently launched, sorry not on Akash, on Cosmos, I believe they’re using Akash as well. I’m really excited about that. So the areas I’m really excited about are cross-chain composability, DWS, and Cosmos’ ecosystem.
Chris Sinkey: Well, I got some studying to do; I want to go dig in and learn. In my day job here at Bittrex Global, I don’t get a lot of time to dig into the ecosystem, so we’re heads down trying to run a company. It’s conversations like these that get me really excited about the future. I think, for everybody listening, you just got a masterclass in the future. So I hope you paid attention.
Greg Osuri: I picked Solana in 2018. I like to pick projects that are not launched but show great progress. Actually, if you go to Solana on YouTube, you’ll see one of the first and second videos. It’s a video of me interviewing Anatoly in 2019. You can’t see our faces because it’s a really dark and terrible video, but we can certainly hear voices. I told people why I’m really excited about Solana ad not I wish people took me seriously back then. But nevertheless…
Chris Sinkey: I think they’re taking you seriously now.
Greg Osuri: Nevertheless, I’m really excited about pre-launch tokens, Agoric and Strange Clan, to name a few.
Chris Sinkey: Thank you so much Greg for coming on the podcast and talking with us about Akash Network and all things crypto, and blockchain. I know I learned quite a bit, and I hope our audience did as well about everything that we discussed here today.
Chris Sinkey: We’re definitely looking forward to hearing the news that’s up and coming about Akash in the coming weeks, so we’ll stay tuned for that, and thank you so much again for choosing to list Akash on Bittrex Global.
Greg Osuri: Thank you so much, Chris; I had a great time as well.
Chris Sinkey: Thanks for listening to The Bit. The Bittrex Global podcast. Our guest today was Greg Osuri, Co-Founder and CEO of Akash Network. To learn more about Akash Network, visit akash.network that’s A K A S H dot N E T W O R K. To learn more about Bittrex Global, visit global.bittrex.com or just go to bittrex.com, and it will redirect you.
Please make sure to subscribe to our podcast. You can find us everywhere you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening, and thanks for making The Bit one of the fastest-growing podcasts in the world of crypto. I’m Chris Sinkey, again, Chief Business Officer at Bittrex Global.
