BlockTalks x Akash Network AMA Transcript!
Hello! BlockTalkers & Blockchain Enthusiastic!
We recently hosted an AMA with Akash Network, on November 13th at 2.00 PM UTC. Many of you might have participated or many of not. But we make sure no one missed out from the knowledge shared by Cheng Wang, Chief Financial Officer at Akash Network so here we are up with the AMA transcript, for those who missed the live session, this blog post will be a saver & feeder of knowledge for them.
INTRODUCTION
Cheng Wang ~ I’m Cheng, the CFO of Akash and I joined our team back in March/April this year. I spent nearly a decade of my career initially in traditional finance with several investment banks with the last notable stop at Goldman Sachs. Since then, I caught the startup bug and worked for a high growth mobile gaming company as its CFO before jumping into blockchain in 2018.
Introduction Questions Asked By Team BlockTalks
Q1. Could you please introduce Akash Network to our community in layman’s term?
Ans — Projected to be a $370 billion market by 2022, cloud infrastructure — the backbone of the Internet — is increasingly becoming centralized, with 71% of the market controlled by an oligopoly of four companies (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure. and Alibaba Cloud).
Akash’s mission is to break this oligopoly using a decentralized network of computing clusters (data centers), and offering resources in a peer-to-peer marketplace to build a resilient and unstoppable cloud marketplace at up to 10x less cost than what you would pay in the market today.
Q2. What are the advantages of Akash Network to the other alternatives in the Blockchain field?
Ans — Akash offers a unique set of value propositions to customers currently using the cloud:
1. Lower cost: Akash users set the price, providers compete to win the work at that price. This way the price is always lower because it’s naturally driven by the laws of demand and supply.
2. Unstoppable: An application running on Akash can only be stopped by its owner and an application will always find a new provider incase a provider running your app goes down. This ensures resiliency.
3. Improved productivity: A human centric design that lets developers do more with less.
4. Private and Permissionless: The application is secured even with someone who has physical access to the server and no one can stop you from using Akash.
Q3. What are the major milestones Akash Network achieved so far & what are in the future pipeline?
Ans — In 2020 we completed a migration to the CosmosSDK, launched The Akashian Challenge testnet, closed our private funding round, sold through the initial 300 pre-orders of our Supermini portable supercomputer, and grew our team by 3x! We just successfully launched our Mainnet 1 and primary listing on BitMax as well.
We look to close 2020 with Phase 3 of our Akashian Challenge testnet followed by the launch of our Mainnet 2. You can Learn more about Phase 3 here :
Questions Asked on Twitter For Akash Network Team!
Q1. Why do you think $AKT token is necessary for your project? What is the main role of $AKT in your project? What are the benefits of holding $AKT in short and long-term?
Ans — Great fundamental question. Several reasons we can detail here:
1. Akash is a sovereign, Proof-of-stake chain that uses a native token AKT as the primary means to secure the blockchain and provide a default mechanism to store and exchange value.
2. Akash also supports a multi-currency settlement mechanism to solve for velocity and volatility of exchanging value. However, the market order book uses Akash Token (AKT) as the reserve currency of the ecosystem. AKT provides a novel settlement option to lock in an exchange rate between AKT and the settlement currency. This way, providers and tenants are protected from the price volatility of AKT.
3. Additionally, the Akashian economics model bootstraps early supply by subsidizing using inflation (i.e., borrowing from the future), and activates an incentive structure that not only fairly distributes, but will unlock network effects to accelerate growth.
4. The intrinsic value of AKT is derived from the token’s earning potential, which has three main contributors that include a) Transaction Fees, b) Take Income from GMV (~20%) and c) Inflationary Rewards (currently around 52%).
For deeper insights, see our (Economics paper)
Q2. How does Akash Network compare with competitors such as Dfinity, ANKR, Filecoin, etc.? In general, what is your difference, and when is it expected that users will use your technology?
Ans — Another good question.
Akash Network is positioned to be a Super-Cloud gateway for developers, ensuring seamless access to other decentralized projects, like NuCypher, DNS, and more.
Other projects in the cloud infrastructure space, like Dfinity and Golem, are both in the same industry as Akash, *Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)*, but our go-to-market is fundamentally different for the $370B industry.
Golem and Dfinity’s market size is less than $300 million.
Golem has on-chain computing and is essentially a supercomputer, which requires supercomputer problems. The market size for that is relatively very small compared to ours. How many applications require supercomputers to run?
Dfinity focuses more on smart contracts. Their PoS improves the throughput of executions but there are limitations to smart contracts.
Ankr as it currently stands is not permission-less or non-custodial like Akash.
We are a compute platform, not a storage platform, so projects like Filecoin aren’t competitive with us, they are complimentary.
Q3. Please tell me about ATK Staking Program: Where can I buy $ATK? What are the steps to participate in Staking? What are the benefits of participating?
Ans — AKT is currently available for purchase on BitMax.
We’ll be transitioning our main wallet and staking provider from Lunie to Cosmosstation, the number one wallet for the Cosmos ecosystem. So stay tuned for more information including a comprehensive staking guide.
In the mean time here are some resources including an overview on staking and guide on how to stake with Lunie.
Overview on Staking:
Staking Guide:
Q4. What is the core team of the Akash project? Who are the investors? Why did you choose to join the Cosmos ecosystem instead of the Ethereum ecosystem? What are the considerations behind?
Ans — Akash was founded by Greg Osuri and Adam Bozanich, globally recognized open source developers and among the top 20 programmers worldwide for authoring open-source libraries adopted by organizations including Ubuntu, HashiCorp, and Kubernetes. They lead our team of renowned open source and blockchain developers, and seasoned experts from leading technology platform companies.
Our investors include renowned Silicon Valley angels and VCs, and leading crypto funds. You can learn more about our core team, advisors & Investors here: [https://akash.network/about/](https://akash.network/about/)
Cosmos, and the underlying consensus algorithm Tendermint has been supporting public chains that transact with real value since 2017. With the launch of the hub and Binance chain in early 2019, it has now been securing billions of dollars of value for years. This production record coupled with the ecosystem of tools supporting the cosmos SDK made the decision easy.
Tendermint attracted us because of its flexibility as a library with a modular and pragmatic design. We chose to build on Tendermint because of its iteration speed and community momentum. As a Go library, it was a natural fit in our [stack](https://github.com/ovrclk).
If we looked at the DeFi space and even cyrptokitties, they constantly run into the issue of network congestion b/c of the limitation on transactions that can be processed per second via ERC20. When that bandwidth gets maxed out, gas fees begin to rise and can make it really, really expensive to transact via ERC20. This congestion and resulting impact makes it really hard for DeFi and other ERC20 application to scale meaningfully.
Cosmos alleviates much of that by allowing far more transactions per second than Ethereum and will allow the AKASH network to reach its goal of being truly unstoppable.
Q5. Can I be a Cloud provider? What are the requirements to being cloud providers & what is the benefits of cloud provider on Akash Network?
Ans — There are no hard requirements, but the user is expected to have a working knowledge/firm understanding of Kubernetes. It’s a mandatory requirement.
As long as (you) the provider specifies their capacity, region, and spins up Kubernetes they should be good.
Offering your unused compute can help you offset the costs associated with running your own servers.
Questions Asked by our BlockTalks Community Members during live Session to Akash Network Team!!
Q1. Can I stake Your Token? What are your Staking criterias?
Ans — This is actually quite straightforward as we’ll be implementing an unbiased, balanced delegation mechanism for our validators. The criteria are basically: you need to have some AKT self delegated, you need to maintain 95% or above uptime, have 10% or lower commission rate.
Q2. What does Akash Network offer for initial use? Are there any bonuses?
Ans — Today, the Akashian model bootstraps early supply by subsidizing cloud providers using inflationary rewards (i.e., borrowing from the future) — it is designed to create economic conditions to unlock network effects to accelerate growth.
Q3. Many investors hit and run in the sell and sell session after listing on the first exchange, How did Your project prevent early investors from selling their tokens and what benefits you would give them?
Ans — For all of our private investors and our team, we implemented a long-term lock up (or vesting) schedule. All of these investors are subject to a 24 month lockup period that only starts at 12 months after mainnet launch. The team’s lockup is even longer than that. All of this, in addition to our significant staking rewards (currently ~52%) are mechanisms we have put in place to discourage these “hit and run” elements.
Q4. How do you plan to spread awareness about your project in different countries where English is not spoken well?
Do you have local communities for them to let them better understand about your project?
Ans — Akash has already attracted a large global audience and have a validator community encompassing North America, South America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. We have teams in China and Russia to support our large audiences there, and we’re continuing to expand support to additional global regions. We’re excited to announce additional global expansions and support in the coming months.
If you’d like to join our Chinese Wechat groups please pm for an invite.
Russian Telegram:
Q5. Do you have any Coin Burn / BuyBack systems or any Token Burn plans to increase the value of Token & attract Investors to invest?
Ans — Burning isn’t something we’re currently considering, to be honest. In terms of other market strategies like buybacks, we can’t really dive into the specifics since giving any sort of indication with regards to AKT price one way or the other is something that’s frowned upon by US regulators.
Our focus is to bring true utility to the Network and AKT. The only way to do that is to build our network and achieve this mission we’ve set out to achieve. Part of that includes the proper management of our markets, of course. We believe that by unlocking the true utility of the Akash Network, the power and value of the network will be totally transparent and self-evident:
Q6. DeFi project is very popular and there are many DeFi projects right now, what are your plans for now? what makes $AKT unique?
Ans — DeFi is indeed very, very hot right now and we believe Akash is the perfect partner to allow DeFi to take the next step in its evolution. By decoupling from centralized cloud infrastructure like AWS, DeFi and TRULY become decentralized powered by the Akash Network. This is one of our most unique and important value propositions: true decentralization that doesn’t have an ultimately centralized endpoint. Even Ethereum, a “fully decentralized” blockchain is significantly reliant on AWS.
I encourage everyone to take a look at this post we made about DeCloud for DeFi :)
Q7. Do you plan to build partnerships with local cryptocurrency developers and local project in each country to make the use of Akash more global?
Ans — 100%. Our sights and aspirations are global, our communities are global, and our product is global, so we understand the importance of global outreach. In the near term, we’re focusing on the Cosmos ecosystem since we’re built using Cosmos.
Just to highlight a few partnerships we’ve established thus far:
Chainlink:
Kava:
ICF:
Q8. You said that Akash Network is offering upto 10x less cost than what we are paying in the market today, this sounds really good.
Can you explain please how Akash Network will provide best services than other competitors within such a low cost.
How Akash Network make this possible?
Generating a token is easy, but to make its valuable, can be difficult. Beside building strong community, developing mainnet function, what else will Akash Network do to make AKT token more valuable?
Ans — In terms of how Akash is able to offer such a reduced cost for compute, it’s really based on several mechanisms and market dynamics. The primary ones are:
1. Cheaper via subsidies. Part of the reason why our inflation rewards are as strong as they are is to tap into these rewards as a mechanism for subsidizing the cost to those seeking to buy compute on the network.
2. Generally, participants in the Akash Network aren’t necessarily optimizing for maximum profits because they need to be competitive in the market when there are many market participants looking to sell their unused capacity. If they ask too high a price, naturally, their compute wouldn’t be used, so there’s a free-form factor of market competition at play here that will help drive prices lower.
As previously mentioned regarding subjects addressing the value of AKT: “In terms of other market strategies like buybacks, we can’t really dive into the specifics since giving any sort of indication with regards to AKT price one way or the other is something that’s frowned upon by US regulators. Our focus is to bring true utility to the Network and AKT. The only way to do that is to build our network and achieve this mission we’ve set out to achieve. Part of that includes the proper management of our markets, of course. We believe that by unlocking the true utility of the Akash Network, the power and value of the network will be totally transparent and self-evident:
Q9. How does AKASH validators system works? And how will Akash pass the chalenge to bring Fair rewards to each validators?
Ans — Akash is built on the CosmosSDK and is its own sovereign chain with a dedicated validator set. Validators will earn rewards proportional to the total stake delegated to them. At Genesis, the initial inflation was set to 54% Annualized APR, gradually decreasing each month and halving every 3.75 years. These parameters are subject to updates as the network starts to develop and mature, so please make sure you stay tuned into our channels for updates (including governance proposals).
More details about rewards and inflation can be found on our token page here:
Q10. Where does the project name come from? What does it mean for you and why did you choose that name for your project?What is the source of this name
Ans — Akash in sanskrit means “ether” or the “sky”. Name is relevant since cloud are formed in the Sky :)
Here are some important links of Akash Network👇
Official Website: https://akash.network/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/akashnet_
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/DxftX67
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/akashnw
Telegram: https://t.me/AkashNW
