Render Network: The Pioneer of The Decentralized GPU Rendering Revolution
Part 1: The Rise of AI Propels Demand for Render Network Resources
ChatGPT, hailed by Bill Gates as “as revolutionary as mobile phones and the internet”, has become hugely popular around the world. This intelligent chatbot heavily relies on high-performance GPU chips to train models as its underlying technology is AI natural language processing. Therefore, the recent popularity of ChatGPT has led to a surge in market demand and market heat for products from NVIDIA and Render Network (known as the “the Web3 NVIDIA”), which both have GPU computing power as their core. Specifically, after NVIDIA’s stock price dropped nearly 60% in the first half of 2022, its market value rose 85% in the past three months thanks to ChatGPT, while the price of Render Network’s token $RNDR rocketed by over 400% in January and February of this year.
Render Network is a distributed rendering network built by utilizing blockchain technology to aggregate idle GPUs worldwide. Compared with centralized cloud rendering services, Render Network has nearly unlimited computing power resources and features high computational efficiency, low cost, and good security. Render can not only provide abundant GPU computing resources for the AI field but also help train AI models and provide a creative platform for creating images, videos, and other content. At the same time, Render can also use AI technology to optimize the rendering process, improving rendering speed and quality.
Render hopes to seize the “huge wave” of commercializing artificial intelligence and promote the mutual promotion and integration of its distributed rendering network and AI applications. In its latest short- to medium-term strategic plan, Render identifies advancing AI training and AI rendering-related products and partnerships as one of its top priorities.
Part 2: Render Network’s Diversified Business Reach
After nearly 7 years of development and accumulation, Render Network has become a leading project in the decentralized rendering field. In fact, Render can not only be applied in the AI field, but also can be widely used in multiple areas such as movies, videos, games, entertainment, AR/VR, etc., meeting the growing demand for rendering technology in many industries.
Render has cooperated or conducted business with more than 50 enterprises/projects. Its expanding ecological map includes not only a large number of traditional internet giants (such as Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, etc.), but also well-known film and television technology companies (such as WB, Netflix, HBO, etc.) and top blockchain projects (such as Decentrland, Alogrand, Solana, etc.). Especially, the recent integration with the technology giant Apple has made the rendering application available for free download on M1 and M2 iPads. Once its product is available on the iPhone in the future, millions of users will access its feature interface and use the Render Token network to meet their graphic processing needs.
While receiving recognition from many technology companies, Render is also highly favored by legendary individual artists. Render is essentially a decentralized network composed of artists and GPU computing providers, allowing creators to complete the rendering process of their works with minimal time and cost. Prominent crypto artists Beeple, well-known artist and programmer Pak, and NFT pioneer Carlos Marcial have all been loyal fans of Render and have spoken out for it, and Marvel and DC star illustrator Alex Ross is also a user of the RNDR rendering network.
As one of the three highest-priced living artists, Beeple is skilled at combining popular culture with future technology elements in his creations, and most of his works in recent years have used the Octane Render renderer. March 11th, which just passed, was the 2nd anniversary of Beeple’s work “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” being sold at a high price at Christie’s auction house. On that day, Beeple Studios was officially established, and founder Beeple showcased the rendering works of many top artists on the Render Network at its grand opening, which was a visual feast that made art lovers scream with excitement. The opening was highlighted by a live 1-hour Everyday (#5793) that Beeple created (using OctaneRender) while audiences watched the process play out on the gallery’s immersive screen.
Part 3: Popular Core Products
3.1 Octane 2022: Latest and Most Powerful Flagship Product
Render Network’s most popular product is OctaneRender, a GPU rendering engine developed by Render Network’s parent company OTOY, which is unbiased and spectral-aware. OctaneRender has gone through several iterations in recent years, including Octane 2020, 2021, and 2022, with continuously evolving rendering performance and effects. The powerful OctaneRender 2022.1 was integrated into Render Network earlier this year, significantly improving the quality and efficiency of Render’s network rendering services.
In November of last year, the release of Octane 2022 garnered significant attention from the rendering industry and the Web3 community, mainly due to the extensive upgrades, numerous updates, and significant performance improvements in Octane 2022.
3.2 Octane X - A Revolutionary Product Developed in Synergy with Render Network
The Octane X app was released on the Mac App Store in 2021, bringing tens of thousands of MacOS users into the rendering world created by OTOY. This product has received widespread praise. In October of last year, Octane X continued to iterate by releasing support for M1 and M2 iPads (iPad Pro and M1 iPad Air), further expanding the product’s application market.
More importantly, Octane X on iPad has seamless integration with Render Network. This means that Octane X can not only access Render Network’s nearly infinite GPU computing power from its decentralized rendering network, but it can also use dozens of AI models based on Stable Diffusion, a deep learning algorithm for text-to-image generation, that Render Network already supports. These AI models can help artists improve their creative efficiency and inspire their artistic imagination. It can be said that Render Network has provided great product potential for Octane X.
For Render Network, the support of macOS and iOS markets by Octane X also provides a huge new user base, and it is easy to foresee that more users will access and use Render Network’s decentralized rendering network through more convenient means in the future.
In this revolutionary creative workflow, the flywheel effect of Render Network and Octane X will gradually emerge: the former provides the latter with almost unlimited GPU rendering network and AI models, with excellent network performance and underlying technology as the cornerstone of Octane X’s powerful functions. Octane X expands its business applications through product/UI upgrades, support for more technical tools and operating environments, and also drives Render Network’s business growth. The two form a long-term mutually reinforcing and collaborative development mode.
As Render Network founder Jules Urbach said,“As we look to the future of computing and next generation media, being able to create, share, and monetize artwork from any device in near real-time will profoundly reshape the information landscape in the coming decades. Octane X for the iPad is a window into the future of ubiquitous immersive computing — with our tools, we hope it will become a game changer for creative expression.”
3.3 Rendering Business Data Performance of Render Network
Despite the super bear market in the cryptocurrency market in 2022, the decentralized rendering network Render has developed well. The total number of rendered frames in 2022 was 9,420,335, a year-on-year increase of 58%. The token RNDR, which reflects the network usage and user activity of the decentralized rendering network, had a usage of 498,733 in Q4 2022, an increase of about 17% compared to Q1 of the same year. In addition to the increase in business scale in 2022, Render Network has also made significant improvements in network performance, such as upgrading the infrastructure of the network backend. The network failure rate in Q4 2022 was reduced by 50% compared to Q3, and the performance of the network nodes in Q4 increased by 50–75% compared to Q3.
Part 4: Powerful and Robust Technical Support
The advantages of the core products of Render Network cannot be separated from the mature and stable technical support behind them, such as the integration of rendering and AI technology, distributed rendering architecture, and rich rendering engine support. Combining rendering with AI technology reduces the threshold for work creation, and can automatically analyze and remove noise in images, improving the overall effect of rendering. The distributed rendering architecture solves the widespread drawbacks of traditional rendering services such as inflexibility of rendering parameters and shortage of computing resources. In addition, a variety of high-quality rendering engines meet users’ different quality rendering needs.
4.1 Integration of Rendering and AI Technology
The integration and development of AI technology is the current focus of the Render Network. By introducing AI training and AI rendering workloads into the network to improve the quality of generated images, it is expected to be one of the largest sources of computing growth for the Render Network in 2023, which is also a generational change in the computing field.
4.1.1 Stable Diffusion
Stable Diffusion is a deep learning, text-to-image model released in 2022. It is primarily used to generate detailed images conditioned on text descriptions, though it can also be applied to other tasks such as inpainting, outpainting, and generating image-to-image translations guided by a text prompt.
AI toolsets like Stable Diffusion integrated into Octane and the Render Network have the potential to augment the creative process in some very interesting ways. With a single scene or animation, artists can now create on-chain generative prompt-based renders using Stable Diffusion. AI also can simplify time consuming, laborious elements of the creative process — for example, generic texture creation — making creating 3D artwork much more intuitive and accessible to a wider variety of artists. AI textures also have the potential to open up new creative concepts, where artists can rapidly iterate on styles using prompts, creating a new toolset for look and style development. Below is an example of generating multiple near-photographs by AI after entering text in Stable Diffusion.
Stable Diffusion will allow people to use AI technology more widely on Octane and Render Network. Not everyone can be a photographer, but in the future, everyone will be able to use AI to create high quality work, and the universalization of technology is part of the Render Network vision.
4.1.2 AI Denoiser
In computer graphics, it is common to have some noise in rendered images, which can affect the quality of the image and reduce user experience. Render Network has introduced AI Denoiser technology into its core product, which can remove rendering noise while preserving image details, resulting in higher quality rendering. AI Denoiser trains a neural network to learn statistical features such as pixel mean and variance of an image, which represent its color distribution and texture information. The neural network is then used to denoise images with noise. Because neural networks have strong learning and inference capabilities, even new noise in the input image can be efficiently removed. The integration with AI Denoiser technology leads to higher rendering quality and better results.
4.2 Diverse Rendering Engine Support
Render Network currently supports a wide range of rendering engines including Octane Render, Arnold, Redshift, V-Ray and Cycles, which basically cover the mainstream Cinema 4D rendering engines, which are widely used in film, games, architecture and other fields. Users can switch rendering engines smoothly according to their needs to achieve the best rendering effect and speed. At the same time, Render is constantly expanding and updating the supported rendering engines, aiming to form a distributed GPU rendering platform independent of the tool chain. Notably, Octane Render is a commercially available unbiased physics rendering engine developed by Render’s parent company OTOY. Unbiased physics rendering typically requires a lot of sampling and computation, but allows for highly realistic rendering compared to biased physics rendering, which allows for simple but relatively fast rendering.
4.3 Decentralised Rendering Architecture
The rise of AI and immersive media has heightened concerns about the risks of centralization, technological control, and inequality — making it even more urgent to build an open platform for a shared and open decentralized metaverse. Render Network has built a decentralized rendering network based on blockchain technology that has a number of advantages over traditional cloud rendering services.
- Firstly, the stability and continuity of the service is guaranteed; Render Network runs across multiple nodes, avoiding single point of failure and security risks, while having higher computing resources and bandwidth to better meet the needs of large-scale rendering tasks. Against the backdrop of global chip shortages and supply chain issues in 2021 and 2022, RNDR provides a more reliable and efficient rendering solution to help a large number of users worldwide to complete their rendering tasks in a timely manner and avoid losses due to rendering delays.
- Secondly, the flexibility and quality of the service is high, with the Render Network having nodes from individuals or rendering service providers in each region. Customers can specify their rendering parameters through a smart contract, and Render Network can flexibly adjust the allocation strategy for rendering tasks through the smart contract, automatically selecting the most suitable node to complete the task based on the resources and performance of the nodes in the network, which can greatly improve the efficiency and quality of rendering.
Part 5: Latest Progress on Decentralization
Render Network is not only highly decentralized in the operation mechanism of the network but also actively promotes the healthy and sustainable development of the network through decentralized governance. Recently, it has also taken a series of significant measures, such as initiating the Render Network Proposal (RNP) and establishing the not-for-profit organization Render Network Foundation in January 2023.
In January 2023, the founding group transferred control of the core Render Network repos and the Render Network brand to the Foundation, a major step in decentralization and putting governance and control in the hands of the community. The Render Network Foundation has recruited a veteran team of executives, crypto-natives, and advisors to help grow the ecosystem. They will be responsible for the daily management of the Render Network, with a focus on implementing important RNP proposals that will help the network expand its computational power, attract new users, support community development, and increase decentralization.
The first RNP proposal proposed for implementation of the Render Network is a “Burn-and-Mint Equilibrium (BME)” model similar to that implemented by Helium (a decentralized IoT project). BME is a dual-token economic structure that includes a value token and a payment token (credit score) for the network. To use network services, end-users must burn the protocol’s value token to obtain the proprietary payment token (credit score) needed for payment.
After implementing the BME model, creators pay for rendering tasks in USD, and then destroy the corresponding value of RNDR tokens. Node operators receive non-transferable credit score as proof of work. RNDR tokens are transformed from payment tokens to commodities.
The proposal plans to increase the issuance of RNDR tokens to continuously incentivize stakeholders in the network. Creators can receive RNDR token rewards equal to a certain percentage of the amount spent during a certain period. Node operators will receive rewards for performing work or providing value, including actual work rewards and availability rewards. Liquidity providers will receive rewards for contributing collateral tokens to liquidity pools on partnered exchanges.
The proposal is significant, as it marks the official launch of the community-driven RNP and the implementation of the new token economic model proposed in this proposal will have a positive impact on the entire ecosystem. Firstly, replacing RNDR with credit points for payment is beneficial for maintaining the commercial stability of the entire ecosystem, protecting it from the influence of token price fluctuations. Secondly, under the new model, all network participants can receive more token incentives, which is conducive to promoting the overall usage of the network. In addition, when the demand for rendering services increases to a certain level in the future, the amount of RNDR tokens destroyed will exceed the amount of tokens minted, achieving token deflation similar to ETH.
Part 6: Professional Team
Render’s parent company OTOY has a strong technical capability and is a leading cloud rendering company in the United States. OTOY’s cutting-edge technology has won an Oscar award, and its flagship product OctaneRender is the world’s first and fastest GPU-accelerated, unbiased, physically correct renderer, widely used by leading visual effects studios, artists, animators, designers, architects, and developers.
Jules Urbach, co-founder and CEO of OTOY, founded Render Network in 2016. Jules Urbach himself is a pioneer and leader in computer graphics, streaming, and 3D rendering, with nearly 30 years of experience in related fields. Jules has been called by George Gilder, one of America’s legendary economists, futurists, and three great thinkers of the digital age, “the most inventive software developer he has ever seen.” He has been covered by top-tier international media outlets such as Forbes and CNN Money.
The experienced 3D rendering team at Render, led by Jules Urbach, consists of industry and technical experts from around the world. The advisory team is also outstanding, including well-known crypto artist Beeple, as well as industry leaders such as Ari Emanuel, co-founder and co-CEO of WME IMG, chairman and CEO of Bad Robot Productions J.J. Abrams, and Brendan Eich, founder and CEO of Brave Software and co-founder of BAT and inventor of JavaScript.
Part 7: Excellent Supporters
Render has won the backing of a number of high profile institutional and individual investors for its highly competitive product and technical strength.
Early angel investors include Vinny Lingham (Founder & CEO of Civic, General Partner of Multicoin Capital and Newtown Partners) and Bill Lee (Co-Founder and General Partner of Craft Ventures). In subsequent funding rounds, Render network has attracted leading institutions such as Multicoin Capital, DFG, Solana Foundation, Sfermion, Microsoft, Kenetic, Algorand and 11–11 DG Partners. In addition, Render has now developed into a leading player in the decentralized rendering space and is expected to become Web3 Nvidia in the long term, with high potential for market cap growth.
Part 8: The Summary
Render demonstrates how blockchain technology can be used to create a project with amazing use cases and lots of real life potential. As mentioned earlier, Render Network has already collaborated with over 50 enterprises/projects, and has established substantial business relationships in large technology companies, top blockchain projects, and the film and television industries. The newly launched Octane 2022 product has also significantly improved in rendering quality and efficiency, and has shown excellent operational performance data.
Furthermore, Render Network has a very high potential for future narrative continuity. The commercialization of AI has just opened its floodgates, and AI-related fields such as AR and VR are also on the rise. In the future, there will undoubtedly be a sustained high demand for distributed GPU computing power networks like Render. Additionally, traditional fields such as film, video, and games have seen explosive growth in demand for high-quality, low-cost rendering services. The wide range of application scenarios for the Render Network determines that it will have a bright future. Furthermore, it can be expected that with the technological breakthroughs and product launches in the AR and VR fields by partners such as Apple, the Render Network will have the potential to reach hundreds of millions of global end users.
From Render’s latest roadmap released in February of this year, the distributed rendering service platform is accelerating the expansion process of its products. The core measures include: 1) Deepening the integration of AI technology and rendering, bringing AI training and AI rendering workflows into the workflow; 2) Continuously integrating more mainstream rendering engines and covering more users in the rendering pipeline; 3) Achieving multi-backend and thin client rendering for Octane X, meeting users’ cross-platform usage requirements. In addition, it also includes expanding the application areas of rendering services and migrating to different Layer1 blockchains (e.g. Solana) in search of continued growth, etc.
It is worth mentioning that Render’s work plan is pragmatic and feasible, and is based on the extension and improvement of Render’s own product foundation and technological advantages. DFG is one of the early investors in the Render Network and continues to pay attention to the project’s product and technological progress. We believe that Render Network is well prepared to lead a large-scale 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 Web3.0, CeFi, DeFi, NFTs, 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 Web3.0 projects that will bring a paradigm shift to the world.
DFG Website: https://dfg.group
DFG Twitter: @DFG_Official
DFG LinkedIn: DFG
