Render Network: The Perfect Fusion of Super-Speed Blockchain and AI Power
Intro
On November 2nd, Render Network officially announced that it had successfully completed its upgrade to Solana, meaning that the leading company in decentralized rendering has officially migrated from the Polygon ecosystem to the Solana ecosystem. In fact, Render is in the midst of a massive series of upgrades involving the implementation of a number of Render Network proposals (RNPs) that have been approved by the community over the past year or so, including not only the migration of the Layer 1 ecosystem but also the issuance of new tokens (RENDER) and the implementation of the new Burn and Mint Equilibrium (BME) Token Economy Model, with far-reaching implications for the entire Render ecosystem and all RNDR（soon to be upgraded and renamed as RENDER） stakeholders.
Recent secondary market data shows that the entire community has given positive feedback on Render’s recent upgrades. The RNDR token has recently risen over $4, reaching a 21-month high, according to Coingecko.
Core Components of the Upgrade
Render is in the process of implementing a series of major, long-planned technology upgrades that are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. The core migration includes the migration from the Polygon to the Solana ecosystem, the upgrade from the old token RNDR to the new token RENDER, the introduction of the BME model, and token incentives and ecological resource redistribution mechanisms designed around the implementation of the BME model.
- Adoption of the BME model
The introduction of the BME model is the centerpiece of this series of upgrades. Back in June 2022, the Render community created RNP-001, proposing the introduction of the BME model, which has been successfully used by the Helium Network.
Render Network is preparing to switch to a BME model with a net emissions cap. By using this new token model, long-term supply and demand equilibrium or even deflation of RENDER is achieved. The new model is expected to be deployed in the coming weeks, at which point emissions will commence on Solana, according to the RNP-001.
RNP-006, which just passed the final vote, provides detail on the distribution of emissions that are a part of the Burn and Mint Equilibrium (BME), detailing how emissions are split between different network participants including Node Operators, Compute Client Partners, Artists, and Liquidity Providers.
- Moving to the Solana Ecosystem
In order to better implement the BME model and meet the longer-term needs of the Render network, the community has made the big decision to migrate from Polygon to the Solana ecosystem.
In the community sentiment polling that screened the new L1s, nearly 55% of community members supported Solana because Solana is faster, cheaper, and more capable of meeting Render’s future scaling needs.
One of the most prominent changes of the Solana upgrade is the introduction of $RENDER (the Solana SPL token) to replace $RNDR (the ERC20 token). All jobs on the Render Network (both 3D and AI) will be paid in $RENDER. Users can transfer and upgrade their current RNDR tokens into RENDER for free for a limited time.
Another change involved in the Solana upgrade is the introduction of a new Solana-compatible voting system. Community members upgrading to RENDER SPL tokens can participate in Render’s governance through Nation.io, a snapshot-like voting system. During the upgrade, both Nation and Snapshot voting on RNPs will be open, and votes will be accumulated on both platforms.
- Redistribution of Ecosystem Resources
The new BME model establishes a balanced emissions schedule to ensure that emissions are flexible enough to reward the network’s four main stakeholders (node operators, artists, liquidity providers and compute clients) in proportion to the value of their contributions.
Creators (Artists) will receive a percentage of the RENDER spent on the epoch in the form of RENDER token rewards. The percentage reward may be as high as 100% of the RENDER initially spent and may diminish over time. Node Operators will be rewarded for performing work or providing value, and the Render Foundation has announced the release of 1.14 million RENDER tokens as an incentive to attract new Node Operators for AI compute jobs. Liquidity providers will be rewarded each period for contributing staked tokens to the liquidity pools of partner exchanges. Common token holders are also incentivized for early migration from RNDR to RENDER. In addition, given the network’s growth objectives, the distribution of rewards among specific stakeholders or new stakeholders emerging from the network’s operations will remain adjustable to ensure that value-adding participants are compensated for their work. Overall, the implementation of the new model will create incentives for all parties involved in the ecosystem.
What’s the Impact of the Upgrade to Solana on Render?
- More Resilient and Sustainable Tokenomics
With the introduction of the BME model, RENDER tokens will receive more value backing and will also de facto move to a deflationary regime. The new model has two main advantages over the previous payment token model:
- RENDER will be considered a commodity asset, further in line with the network’s long-term aim of establishing a standard for tokenized compute.
- RENDER will enter into a de facto deflationary mechanism, and the value of the tokens will grow significantly under certain load conditions as the network’s utilization grows.
Specifically, under the new model, when the demand for rendering tasks is insufficient, miners can get more income than before, while when the total task price corresponding to the demand for rendering tasks is greater than the total amount of $RENDER rewards released, miners will get less income compared to the original model (burned out tokens > freshly minted tokens), and the $RENDER tokens will enter a deflationary state.
A review of the Render Network’s operations shows that it has seen an increase in rendering workload of about 20–30% in the last 3 months. According to a report published by Insight Partners, the visualization and 3D rendering software market is projected to reach $11.83 billion in revenue by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 20.3% from 2022 to 2030. In the coming years, the usage growth is also expected to come from multiple compute client adoptions, which we assume will add a large number of users and traffic at a scale similar to rendering. The surge in business demand will trigger the burn mechanism of RENDER tokens and accelerate the deflation of RENDER.
- Faster and More Cost-effective Network
Render is already a mature program processing millions of frames per year, and the demands on the underlying L1 network are increasing significantly. Migrating from Polygon to Solana will greatly facilitate the expansion of Render’s business in terms of underlying infrastructure in the following ways:
Transaction performance, the most intuitive metric, is TPS. The main network TPS of Ethereum is only about 14, the live TPS of Polygon is between 130 and 140, while the average TPS of Solana in recent months is more than 30 times that of Polygon, which is around 4,000. Distributed rendering services require real-time networks, higher hardware requirements for rendering, and interactive messaging mechanisms. They also need to synchronize onchain node states to maintain a decentralized network. Therefore, the L1 supporting render must have the ability to withstand stress at large scales and high loads and satisfy both on-chain and off-chain mobility.
Transaction cost: the Solana network has higher transaction throughput and lower transaction fees than Polygon. If we take the current fee data and bring it into the Render team’s estimates, the rendering cost (i.e., transaction fees) for the same number of frames running on Solana is about 1,000 times less than Polygon, and transaction costs are also a core consideration due to the Render network’s huge network traffic requirements for on-chain state synchronization.
Overall, Solana is faster, less expensive, and capable of handling the broad vision of the Render Network compared to Polygon, which was built with the goal of providing real-time, rendered, interactive holographic streams. This will require the state to be dynamically updated in real time and on chain. To do this, the network needs to be able to write high-performance code both on-chain and on the GPU. Rust can provide the render network with greater speed and flexibility than Solidity, ultimately allowing the same code to be used for GPU rendering work and smart contracts.
- More potential for DePin, AI, and Digital Rights Management (DRM)
Render is one of the benchmarks in the DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network) sector in the Web3 space, providing hardware infrastructure for rendering, AI, and other sectors, and is currently regarded as the NVIDIA of the Web3 world. From Coingecko’s market capitalization data, it can also be seen that Render is currently second only to Filecoin, the leading decentralized storage project in the DePIN sector, surpassing well-known projects such as Arweave and Helium. In the context of the current outbreak of AI applications, Render is one of the few projects that can continue to innovate and realize the AI narrative. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is also another fundamental area of Render’s focus, enabling fast, low-cost multi-party royalty streaming, which is important for monetizing next-generation media such as streaming experiences. With the Solana migration, it’s also possible to bring DRM and royalties for complex 3D assets, IP, and AI works on-chain where contributions to training sets can be remunerated.
At present, whether it is a business scenario or an economic model, Render, compared to Filecoin, has more obvious growth potential and imagination and is expected to catch up with Filecoin and become the top project in both the DePin, AI, DRM sectors in the future.
Looking Ahead from Explosive Growth
Since April this year, the rendering business has entered a period of rapid growth. The rendering tasks this April reached a record high of 179.5k. Compared with the previous months, there has been 10-fold near-exponential growth. So far, the average number of rendering tasks per month is more than 120k, and the number is still growing, which shows the explosive nature of the rendering business. The main reasons are as follows:
- The partnership between parent company OTOY (a leading cloud rendering company in the U.S.) and Apple. Apple’s official promotional video repeatedly appeared in the Render network’s logo. Octane X supports M1, M2, and the latest M3 high-performance chips on Mac and iPad, and in the future, Render may become a built-in rendering component of Apple’s software.
- Partnership recently established with Stable Diffusion which will allow Render to generate 3D images and video rendering scenarios from large language models.
Render, utilizing the strong rendering technology of its parent company OTOY, has long occupied a head position in the field of decentralized rendering, but Render itself has been constantly pursuing innovation and iteration of products and technology. The innovation of tokenomics and the migration of the L1 network are for the subsequent better provision of cloud rendering services.
In addition to this, Render is working on more innovative upgrades, such as the latest RNP-007 to introduce the FEDML cloud platform, which aims to bring the needs of the AI community to Render’s compute network, and the inclusion of FEDML’s GPU marketplace into Render, which will enable AI developers to have seamless access to Render’s powerful, distributed GPU resources. In addition to FedML, Render is also actively introducing various other computing clients, such as Beam, io.net, and other cloud platforms. Moreover, The availability of multi-renders for users with the addition of Maxon’s Redshift, Physical, and Standard renderers was announced at Solana Breakpoint 2023.
These actions will ensure that Render maintains a high level of narrative continuity in the future; AI commercialization has just opened the valve, and AI-related AR, VR, and other fields are also poised to take off, which will inevitably create a sustained high demand for distributed GPU arithmetic networks such as Render in the future; DFG is one of the early investors in Render Network and continues to be optimistic about the project’s product and technology progress. We believe Render Network is well-positioned to lead a massive decentralized rendering revolution.
About DFG
Digital Finance Group (DFG) is a global blockchain and cryptocurrency investment firm founded in 2015 with assets under management of over $1 billion through a wide range of sectors within the blockchain ecosystem such as Web 3.0, CeFi, DeFi, NFTs, and the Polkadot ecosystem.
Investments include Circle, Ledger, Coinlist, FV Bank, Astar, ChainSafe, and over 100 more. DFG intends to create value, through analytical research, based on the most impactful and promising global blockchain and Web 3.0 projects that will bring a paradigm shift to the world.
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