Akash began as a reverse auction for unused servers and became known for GPU leases. Its revealing 2026 change removed token volatility from each invoice while leaving AKT as stake, governance weight, gas and ACT's raw material. Control now sits across a chosen provider, a price pipeline and a validator-governed chain.
Greg Osuri and Adam Bozanich began the project in 2015-2016 and introduced Akash in 2018. The exchange design separated tenants from datacenters: the chain would record requests and bids rather than operate every server.
Mainnet 1 started staking and governance in September 2020. Mainnet 2 opened live compute in March 2021; Mainnet 6 added GPU leases in August 2023 without turning Akash into one centrally operated GPU cloud.
A tenant declares containers and resources in SDL. Providers quote per block; the tenant compares identity, location, attributes and price, then accepts one bid as a lease.
The manifest goes directly to that provider, which runs the workload on its own infrastructure and can close the lease. Attributes and auditor signatures aid selection, but are not a universal service-level agreement.
Proposal 318 activated Mainnet 17 on March 23, 2026. A tenant can burn AKT at the reference price to mint non-transferable ACT and fund deployment escrow; charges accrue each roughly six-second block and providers withdraw ACT.
Pyth signs AKT/USD data, off-chain Hermes submits it, and Wormhole/Pyth contracts verify it before x/oracle stores the price. If relayers stop or health checks fail, minting can pause; ACT's dollar target is technical accounting, not a legal redemption right.
If minting is halted, existing settlements continue and escrow can fall back to AKT according to module rules. This protects running leases but changes the asset delivered, so tenants and providers must monitor BME health rather than assume ACT availability is unconditional.
AKT bonds validators, pays gas and votes. The mint documentation describes an annual issuance target of 7-20% around a 67% bonded ratio; this does not promise that return to an individual delegator. BME separately removes AKT for ACT and remints through its vault ledger. Net supply therefore follows bonding, usage, prices and timing.
Governance can change parameters, coordinate upgrades, spend community funds and authorize CosmWasm uploads. Current docs list 20% quorum, 50% pass, 33.4% veto and 0% community tax. None of that makes AKT a provider revenue share, hardware title, fixed yield or company equity.
Overclock Labs publishes the tenant-provider exchange design.
AKT staking and governance secure the chain.
Tenants can accept competitive provider bids.
Mainnet 6 expands the marketplace to accelerated compute.
Mainnet 17 introduces oracle-priced compute credit and burn-remint accounting.
Last evidence review: 2026-09-05
Akash Network is a Cosmos SDK and CometBFT blockchain coordinating a market for containerized compute. Tenants describe CPU, GPU, memory, storage and endpoints in SDL; independent providers bid to run them. AKT is the staking, governance and gas asset. Since Mainnet 17 in March 2026, ACT is the normal USD-pegged escrow and provider-settlement unit.
Akash asked whether datacenters could sell spare capacity without one cloud company setting the catalog. Volatile AKT pricing then conflicted with dollar budgets and operating costs. ACT and Burn-Mint Equilibrium stabilize the lease unit, but add an oracle, relayer, vault and governance path while AKT retains variable staking inflation.
A tenant publishes an SDL and funds escrow. Matching providers quote a per-block price; the tenant chooses one, creates a lease and sends that provider the manifest. The provider runs the containers. Escrow accrues ACT charges per block and refunds unused balance at closure. BME burns oracle-priced AKT to issue account-bound ACT and can burn ACT to remint AKT. Validators secure and upgrade the chain; stakers govern parameters and community funds.
The marketplace and coordination layer. Independent providers run each workload and still control its physical host and network.
A tenant submits SDL, funds escrow, chooses a provider bid, creates a lease and sends the manifest. Charges accrue per block.
Current application and deployment documentation describes ACT escrow and ACT provider withdrawals, with AKT fallback when the circuit breaker is active. AEP-76 describes an AKT-payout design; it should not be substituted for the current module guide. AKT underlies BME conversions and pays chain gas.
No. It is account-bound compute credit targeting one dollar; conversion depends on BME, the AKT/USD oracle and circuit breakers, not a legal redemption promise.
Stake-weighted governance approves parameters, software upgrades, pool spends and restricted CosmWasm uploads; validators must run approved binaries.
No static label captures the live model. Staking inflation adjusts within a 7-20% target and BME adds usage-linked burns and remints.
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