Glossary
Akash Network
A decentralized cloud-computing marketplace on Cosmos — providers offer container hosting (often GPU), and users pay AKT for deployments via a reverse auction.
Akash is a marketplace for compute. Providers run "providers" — a Kubernetes-based deployment surface — and bid into a reverse auction when a user submits a deployment manifest. Users pay AKT (or stablecoins) and run their workload on whoever wins the bid.
Akash has leaned into GPU hosting since 2023, positioning as a DePIN supply layer for AI training and inference. Whether the economics work outside of token-incentive periods is the central DePIN question for Akash as for the rest of the category.