io.net

Ahmad Shadid founded io.net around the idea that AI builders could rent scattered GPUs as one managed cloud. The company now dates its launch to June 11, 2023 and says the marketplace opened with 10,000 GPUs in its first quarter. That count is useful as the operator’s starting claim, not an independent inventory audit.

The product had to make heterogeneous machines behave like infrastructure. Customers chose capacity and time; worker operators installed io.net software and exposed hardware. The token came later, so the network’s first promise was a service promise: assemble usable compute on demand.

Reward expectations attracted more than honest suppliers. On April 28, 2024 Shadid said io.net had seen roughly 1.8 million fake-GPU attempts connect during a Sybil campaign and had spent days blocking them. The figure was an attempted attack population. Calling it either real capacity or a final count of paid fraud would overstate the evidence.

At the same time, outsiders found dashboard totals that did not match deployable or rentable machines. Current Explorer documentation now gives its availability total a specific denominator: hired and idle devices both count, but only if they are fully collateralized, Cluster-Ready, have passed Proof of Work and are ready to deploy. Hourly PoW tests computation and VRAM. The general FAQ separately describes a Proof of Time-Lock design for rental-period exclusivity, without exposing the same operational result trail. Passing either definition still does not make every machine suitable for the cluster a customer wants.

Shadid stepped down on June 9, 2024 and handed the CEO role to COO Tory Green. Two days later Binance opened IO trading. The launch notice recorded a 500 million genesis supply, 95 million in initial circulation and a planned 800 million maximum, including 300 million of long-run rewards.

In April 2025 io.net promoted CTO Gaurav Sharma to CEO and moved Green to chair the IOG Foundation. The sequence matters because product operations, Foundation stewardship and token ownership are separate. An IO holder did not elect these executives and does not acquire shares in either organization.

The original model began at 8% annual inflation and reduced the rate monthly while rewarding suppliers and stakers. In its 2026 retrospective, io.net conceded that initial emissions had outpaced demand. It first published IDE for feedback in December 2025, then declared the engine live on June 11, 2026.

IDE compares revenue with targeted supplier payouts. The Reward Vault is the first payout reserve; the Fee Vault is used only after it is insufficient. The launch announcement says at least half of IO revenue retained after provider payments will be burned, while the litepaper leaves emissions, burn parameters and fees under continuing monitoring and adjustment. IDE is therefore an operated controller, not an immutable guarantee. The announced burn of at least 12 million IO over the following year remains management’s forecast.