Disclaimer: the stories shared on this blog are mine, they aren’t financial advice, endorsement, counseling of any kind. Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile and speculative assets plagued by gambling addiction and fraud. Do your own research, never EVER take loans to acquire crypto, never communicate your private keys or mnemonic seed words to anyone, and never invest what you can’t afford to loose.

Websites, mobile apps, backup storage, content distribution, neural network training, gaming servers, .. even blockchain validators and masternodes. All those are very often found relying on cloud computing platforms.

Cloud computing brought a paradigm shift in IT fields, with data processing delegated to containerized virtual machines, spawn up on-demand, and deleted once the task is complete or when bigger resources are needed (for example a service becoming viral and requiring a resource processing closer to customers with greater load balancing).

The three biggest cloud computing providers are Amazon’s AWS, Google’s GCP, and Microsoft’s Azure.

For companies operating hugely popular services, the running costs of their cloud computing infrastructure can be significant. And you know there’s a problem when CloudFlare, the biggest CDN service, goes explicitly dissecting AWS’ horribly high egress costs.

However, there are many companies, hosting providers, just having cloud hypervisors running idle for long periods of time, cloud computing they could sell for significantly cheaper if their customers had a framework to deploy their instances within seconds, with tailored resource profiles, hypervisor-agnostic. And there’s a smart solution: the Akash blockchain, and it’s Akash utility token.

Described as an “AirBnB for cloud computing”, the Akash Network brings that required framework to standardize the process between providing cloud computing resources, and buying such resources to deploy Docker apps and services, all fully automatized and in the blink of an eye.

While still in it’s infancy, this project can already show operational use, and the website Akashlytics keeps track of deployment counts, active deployments, and loaned resources. And a price comparison page, showing just how affordable Akash deployments can be in comparison of centralized providers:

Speaking of infancy: just a couple days ago the Akash Network crossed the 200 active deployments line, showing a steady and slightly accelerating adoption rate.

While I’m personally not an expert in Docker deployment and management, I however do know the huge and increasing needs for cloud computing resources, scalable, quickly started and affordable. Plus, as pointed out by respective project developers, combining technologies of several blockchains make it possible to run a complete, affordable, fast and censorship-resistant cloud infrastructure relying on:

– Akash for processing power
– Sia / SkyNet for storage
– Handshake for domain name service

I played around a bit with Akash and really following instructions to get a “Hello World” web page up and running was quite easy and satisfying. I needed that hands-on approach to evaluate the potential of this project, and I must say I’m convinced. And I really really appreciate the bustling activity of the developers and contributors of that project, making it progress very fast.

Now, to the cryptocurrency side: as said the Akash Network uses the Akash (AKT) coin as utility cryptocurrency. The blockchain relies on the Tendermint consensus protocol, Delegated Proof-of-Stake, with a rather nice 46% APY currently, and the token can be found on several exchanges and DEX Osmosis. Management wallet can be Keplr, Cosmostation.

Delegated staking gives a reward output every 7 seconds (each block), and staked tokens have a 21 days unbound waiting period. There’s a max supply of 388,539,008 AKT. At time of writing, the Akash token is valued $2.46.

Long story short: it’s a project I have my eyes on 😉