Akash
Akash is an open, decentralized marketplace and a deployment platform for cloud compute. Akash is integrating their serverless supercloud infrastructure into Solana to allow users to easily deploy powerful and low cost servers to run nodes or to scale their application.
Akash is focused on delivering a permissionless, sovereign and open cloud where architects and builders of the internet have greater access, freedom, and agency to create products that improve the human experience.
By interoperating with Solana, Akash users will soon be able to run secure and scalable smart contracts on Solana’s hyper-performance platform and pay using Akash Token (AKT). Solana’s users will also soon be able to run distributed applications and settle using the Solana token (SOL) on Akash. Additionally, Akash will provide support for Solana’s validators to run nodes in highly secure and scalable environments.
“When we were exploring potential ways to enable smart contracts, Solana was the only platform that met our requirements. Currently, validators have little to no option other than to run their nodes on centralized cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. 60% of Ethereum nodes currently run on AWS and other centralized cloud service providers. This threatens decentralization at the core. Validators have few alternatives and are forced to make a massive upfront investment in talent, servers, and flexible scalability or choose the big cloud. By leveraging Akash decentralized cloud; Solana’s validators will no longer be required to do this, and they’ll be able to stay decentralized.” – The Akash team