Akash is an open, decentralized marketplace and deployment platform for cloud compute that solves the cloud’s cost problem. The big 3 cloud providers (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) have an oligopoly that lets them overcharge for commodity compute. And their scale means that direct competition is effectively impossible - there will be no more cloud providers. Meanwhile up to 85% of the world’s compute capacity sits idle and inaccessible in companies' private on-prem and colocated datacenters.

Akash connects this massive latent supply with the equally massive and price-sensitive demand via a blockchain based marketplace, integrated with a secure container-native deployment platform.

A company with underutilized server capacity installs the Akash agent on servers they want to add to the network. Once registered with the network, they become available for tenants to deploy containerized workloads to.

Developers who want to deploy to Akash specify their deployment criteria in a declarative file posted to our native blockchain, where it’s picked up and bid on by any provider capable of meeting the criteria. Low bid wins the auction, resulting in cost savings of up to 90% while allowing companies to monetize their depreciating server assets.

Then the parties move off chain to distribute the workload in Docker containers. Once a workload is live, the agreed-on count of Akash tokens is transferred from the tenant’s wallet to the provider’s wallet on a periodic basis for as long as the workload is live, with all that settlement activity written to chain.