Akash Weekly: Axelar Network
Welcome to another issue of The Akash Weekly Newsletter from the team at Overclock Labs.
Tune into our weekly Twitter Spaces held every Wednesday at 8 am PT, featuring the Founder & CEO of Overclock Labs, Greg Osuri — and special guests from around the web3 space.
Explore the Akash Community and check out our Akash Insider and Vanguard programs.
Follow @akashnet_ and @gregosuri for real-time coverage of the Akash ecosystem.
Our guest this week
James Friel, Director of Business Development at Axelar Network
Mainnet 4 Updates
We are weeks away from Mainnet 4. At this point, all bugs are resolved, and we’re finalizing everything before the upgrade goes live.
Mainnet 4 allowed us to push Akash’s tech agenda forward significantly. We have had the vision for years of an open market for IPs, and Mainnet 4 will allow that to become a reality with IP Leases — the first-ever open marketplace for IP addresses.
As mentioned in previous issues of this newsletter, once Mainnet 4 is live, we will immediately shift our focus to integrating GPU support on Akash. Our vision is to build an open GPGPU marketplace to support even more workloads — with an eye on AI and machine learning applications.
Urbit on Akash
With Mainnet 4, Akash will have the ability to run Urbit.
Urbit is a new operating system and peer-to-peer network that aims to recreate a more open, decentralized internet. In Urbit’s terminology, Planets are a type of ID that allows a user’s personal server to connect to the rest of the Urbit network. These planets interact on an open network of apps developed independently by Urbit’s global community. We are excited to be able to support Urbit with Akash Network’s low-cost open marketplace for cloud compute — and we look forward to participating on Urbit as users ourselves.
Cloudmos Alerts
Cloudmos launched its highly-anticipated Alerts product this week. Cloudmos Alerts lets users track the balances of wallets associated with their deployments, as well as tracking transactions to and from any specified wallet address. This will help users stay on top of their deployments and be notified of low balances without manually checking the deployment wallet.
World Bank + Chia
Chia was chosen by The World Bank for its new Climate Warehouse initiative. Chia will help the initiative develop a data-sharing prototype to help track climate project information.
Evergreen Miner. Reservations are currently open for Batch 3 of Evergreen Miner’s pre-configured v2 Chia hub and pre-plotted hard drive.
DHH: Why we’re leaving the cloud
“…It's also about what kind of internet we want to operate in the future. It strikes me as downright tragic that this decentralized wonder of the world is now largely operating on computers owned by a handful of mega corporations. If one of the primary AWS regions go down, seemingly half the internet is offline along with it. This is not what DARPA designed!”
— DHH, Why we're leaving the cloud
Many are moving away from the public cloud and repatriating their datacenters. This evolution of the cloud is a perfect fit with the vision of Akash Network. As more people leave the centralized cloud to run their own hardware — they will find that they have excess compute that ends up going unused. With Akash, these new datacenters can seamlessly bring their unused compute to market while retaining control of their hardware and data sovereignty.
In this way, Akash allows users to become sovereign at scale. It has always been the aim of Akash to help make the cloud more efficient and accessible to more people.
Axelar Network with James Friel
”Axelar powers the cross-chain future by delivering secure cross-chain communications.”
James Friel, Director of Business Development at Axelar Network, joins us this week to give an overview of Axelar and discuss some exciting new developments.
Axelar Network is a blockchain connecting blockchains. In this way, any user can interact with any asset on any chain — with one click. Friel positions Axelar as the ‘Stripe for web3.’
axelarscan.io is the best place to see the network’s developments and explore the chains Axelar currently supports. Currently, Axelar has 50 validators and is looking to increase the number of validators to 75 soon.
General Message Passing (GMP) allows Axelar to send messages cross-chain instead of only assets. GMP leverages Interchain Accounts on Cosmos to enable this feature. Friel looks forward to the many new opportunities that GMP will enable for developers in terms of interchain composability.
Eventually, Axelar will include support for chains written in other programming languages — this means chains that are currently not compatible (or composable) will gain cross-chain functionality. Each new chain added to the network increases Axelar’s total utility across every chain it supports.
On interoperability in web3
“How do we create something more similar to web2? Where the relationship is between the users and the application. The networking and routing, behind the scenes, have been abstracted away. That’s how we saw the mass adoption of the internet. It’s what we saw with Web 2.0. That’s what we need for web3.”
— James Friel, Axelar Network
Q&A
Q: What are Akash’s thoughts on the network metrics over the past year?
A: Active applications on Akash are trending sideways. At Overclock Labs, we understand that active applications are not always the most accurate measure of platform adoption. Some of this comes down to the current state of web3 UX, and the UX of Akash. Overclock Labs, and the Akash community, are working non-stop to improve the UX of the network over time. Asymmetric adoption can also happen with a single company achieving hyper-growth on the network. We will focus on increasing network features and functionality, which will bring Akash to parity with — and eventually surpass — the public cloud.
Listen to the full recording for Greg Osuri’s complete answer to this question.