Render Network Q4 Review and Beyond: February 21st, 2023 [Behind-the-Network (BTN)]
A look back at Q4 2022, the beginning of 2023 and the year ahead on the Render Network
The industry will remember Q4 of 2022 as one of the most challenging periods for the industry. At the Render Network Foundation we are dedicated to maintaining the core Render Network protocol and growing its community and transparency (through things including posts like these). We saw these struggles in our communities as well as significant improvements in our infrastructure and increased growth levels across many key usage metrics. Let’s dig deeper into the numbers.
Overall the Network usage rate grew roughly 10% between Q3 and Q4 2022, showing a consistent uptrend in utilization. This was reflected in significant year-over-year growth between full year 2021 and 2022 — with Total Frames Rendered nearly doubling at 9,420,335 in 2022 vs 5,954,165 in 2021. Q4 also saw acceleration in a trend beginning in the second half of 2022, where the network backend infrastructure significantly improved, enabling greater scalability in 2023. Highlights include a 50% reduction in failure rates, 50–75% increases in performance across the network’s node topology, and across the board growing user growth metrics in relation to Q3 — with significant acceleration in the final month of Q4.
Improvements were not limited to technical progress. In the final quarter of 2022, the network set the stage for the establishment of the Render Network Foundation having ratified the Render Network Proposal (RNP) process, which in January has gone on to pass the first of many major planned tokenomic upgrades with RNP-001: Burn Mint Equilibrium (BME). Meanwhile, creators have used the network for prominent productions — from concert visuals for Lil Nas X’s Montero tour to some of the most innovative cryptoart releases of the fall — including a large cohort of Render Network creators who will be featured at the Beeple Studios grand opening in March.
In reach and mindshare, the network’s social media presence saw its biggest increases ever over the final quarter of 2022. Meanwhile, a focus on educational and onboarding materials led to some of the highest performing social media posts the network has ever seen, growing the user acquisition and retention funnel for increasing usage rates in 2023. Overall, the Network has generally shown steady growth quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year in key metrics. This post will provide granular data from the last quarter of 2022 on these important network metrics.
Network Usage
Amidst a challenging macroeconomic backdrop where usage rates for crypto-services declined — resulting in lower exchange volumes, DeFi and NFT activity when compared to 2021 levels — Render continued to grow. In contrast to these trends, the Render Network managed to maintain consistent growth throughout the last calendar year (2022) when compared with 2021, showcasing the resiliency of the network’s utility and value proposition for users . Between Q3 and Q4 2022 the Network saw an increased usage of around 10%. In a period where growth and usage tends to dip seasonally with the holidays, momentum in this metric was not only maintained, but accelerated.
Throughout all of Q4 2022, total frames rendered on the Network saw a 9.8% increase, outperforming Q3 2022 across all 3 periods of the quarter. This is inline with the consistency/resiliency of users of the Network mentioned above, who have continued to deeply integrate the Network into their creative workflows. Further, repeat usage increased between Q3 and Q4 by about 5%, showing an increase in network stickiness and user retention — an important metric as the network looks to not only convert new users but increase usage among existing users, creating multiple vectors for compounding growth rates.
While work on the Network maintained an upward pace, on the cryptocurrency side, the RNDR Tokens used in Q4 v. Q3 showed a more buoyant pattern, with little change between RNDR used in Q3 to Q4 2022.
This can been seen similarly in the year over year comparison: while Frames rendered in Q4 2022 saw a marked increase compared to the previous year’s Q4, the RNDR used was practically even, with 498,309 RNDR used in Q4 2021 vs 498,733 RNDR used in Q4 2022.
Scalability Improvements
Failure rates on the network substantially decreased between Q3 2022 from a 6% failure rate to a 3% failure rate in Q4. Failure rates are one of the most important proxies for network scalability. Due to the automated nature of blockchain smart contracts, decreasing failure rates is essential to maintaining a network that can grow in a decentralized manner without human intervention. As the network prepares to implement the Burn and Mint Equilibrium (BME), which simplifies and automates many parts of the process for purchasing tokens and paying node operators, decreased failure rates are an important element to running the network at scale.
Community Growth and Engagement
Alongside the statistical growth of Render usage, the Render Network Community has continued to expand over the last months of 2022 and into 2023! Similar to the Network itself, the community has seen a boost in the latter half of Q4 2022 into the beginning of 2023, across almost all social platforms.
Highlights include the Render Network Twitter account gaining approximately 3000 new followers in November 2022 alone, an overall 5% increase in followers, and a roughly 300% increase in follower count in November when compared to the entirety of new followers gained in Q3 2022. This periodic rapid growth in social reach has been noticeable in early 2023.
Social media growth has only accelerated in the opening month of 2023, with almost 10k new followers alone in the last 30 days — a ~15% increase overall in new followers, and a doubling of the growth rate seen in November, creating another 300% increase in follower growth rates month over month between November and January.
Updates, Expansions and Looking Ahead in 2023
The end of 2022 saw a major update rollout for the Render Network platform with the release of Octane 2022 on the Network in late December. This served as a precursor for the changes to come, such as the Foundation and the vote for the BME tokenomics model, which are expected to show tangible impact on Network usage statistics in the months ahead. Coupled with an increased production in tutorials, which have begun to be rolled out over recent weeks and will continue to be over the coming months, adoption of the Network is expected to continue its upward trajectory over the next quarter and beyond.
With these current initiatives, development is currently underway on a number of improvements and additions to the Network that expand the variety of workloads on the network — these include:
- Stable Diffusion jobs supported on the Render Network, bringing AI training and AI rendering workloads to the Network — one of the greatest sources of compute growth in 2023, and a generational change in the compute landscape
- Cinema4D / Redshift Integration bringing multi-render support for creator workflows across the 3D ecosystem, enabling users to leverage the Render Network for any production workflow, frictionlessly mixing between different rendering pipelines on the same platform.
- Octane X multi-backend and thin client rendering, enabling users from the Apple ecosystem to create works on M1 and M2 iPads and MacOS, and then send them to render for final rendering on thousands of decentralized GPU nodes. This is important for the future of virtual production, Augmented Reality, and mobile rendering.
- Streaming Experiences like those demoed in Streaming NFTs at Breakpoint 2022 showing the network’s usage for next generation immersive streaming NFTs, gaming experiences, and thin client mobile virtual production and content creation workflows.
- LightField Rendering Jobs (in early Beta) expanding the network’s intensive rendering services to precomputing lightfields, NeRFs and other holographic rendering jobs, which have the potential to create 10–100x increases in per job rendering demand.
In the coming months, future Behind the Network (BTN) posts and Render Network Foundation pieces will provide detail on the development progress on these additions to the network. The network is poised to build on the momentum seen at the end of 2022 and scale it in 2023.
Join us in the Rendering Revolution at:
Website: https://render.x.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rendernetwork
Knowledge Base: https://know.rendernetwork.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/rendernetwork
Render Network Foundation: https://renderfoundation.com/
