On November 2, Render Network officially announced that it had successfully completed the upgrade to Solana, which means that this leading company in the field of decentralized rendering has officially migrated from the Polygon ecosystem to the Solana ecosystem. This migration will involve the implementation of multiple RNP proposals (Render Network Proposals) that have been reviewed and approved by the Render community over the past year, including not only the migration of the Layer1 ecosystem, but also the issuance of new tokens (RENDER) and the implementation of the new Burn and Mint Equilibrium (BME) token economic model, which will have a profound impact on the entire Render ecosystem and all RNDR (soon to be upgraded and renamed SPL token RENDER) stakeholders.
It can also be seen from the recent secondary market data that the entire community has given positive feedback to Render's recent new actions. Coingecko data shows that Render's token RNDR has recently risen by more than $4, reaching a 21-month high.
RNDR (ERC-20) price trend in the past three months / Source: Coingecko
What core contents are involved in the upgrade?
Render is currently undergoing a series of major technical upgrades, and these upgrade proposals rely on and support each other. The core upgrade content includes
Including migration from Polygon to Solana ecosystem, upgrading from old tokens to new tokens RENDER, and introducing Burn and Mint
The Equilibrium token economic model, as well as the token incentive and ecological resource redistribution mechanism designed around the implementation of the BME model.
Related RNP proposals for Render upgrade / Source: Render Github
Introducing the BME model
The innovation of the token economic model is the core of this series of upgrades. As early as June 2022, the Render community created RNP Proposal 001, proposing the introduction of the Burn and Mint Equilibrium (BME) token economic model, which has been successfully used by Helium Network (HNT).
The Render network is preparing to switch to a BME model with a net emission cap. By adopting a new token model, long-term supply and demand balance and even deflation of RENDER can be achieved. According to the planning of RNP-001, the new model is expected to be deployed in the next few weeks, when the emission plan will be launched on Solana.
RNP-006, which just passed final vote, details a portion of BME’s emissions and distribution, detailing how emissions are allocated between different network participants, including: node operators, computing client partners, artists, and liquidity providers.
Details of emissions and incentive allocations for the first year of the BME model / Source: Render
Join the Solana Ecosystem
In order to better implement the BME proposal and meet the needs of network development, the Render community made a major decision to migrate from Polygon to the Solana ecosystem (RNP-002). In a community sentiment poll to screen new L1s, nearly 55% of community members supported Solana because Solana is faster, cheaper, and more capable of handling the broad vision of the Render network.
A significant change involved in the Solana blockchain upgrade is the introduction of "RENDER" to replace RNDR. RNDR is an ERC-20 token and RENDER is a new token built on the Solana blockchain. All work (3D and AI) on the Render network will be paid in $RENDER, and users can transfer and upgrade current RNDR (ERC-20) tokens to RENDER (SPL).
Another shift involved in the Solana blockchain upgrade is the introduction of a new Solana-compatible voting system. Community members who upgrade to the RENDER SPL token will participate in Render’s network governance through Nation.io, a voting system similar to Snapshot. During the upgrade, both Nation voting and Snapshot voting on RNP will be open, and votes from both platforms will be accumulated.
Render community poll results for L1s / Source: RNP-002
Redistribution of ecological resources
The new BME economic model sets a balanced emission schedule to ensure that emissions are flexible enough to reward the network’s four main stakeholders (node operators, artists, liquidity providers, and computational clients) in proportion to the value of their contributions.
Creators will receive a percentage of the RENDER spent in that epoch in the form of RENDER token rewards. The percentage of returns may be as high as 100% of the RENDER initially spent and may gradually decrease over time. Node operators will be rewarded for performing work or providing value, and the Render Foundation has announced the issuance of 1.14 million RENDER tokens as an incentive to attract new node operators to participate in AI computing tasks. Liquidity providers will receive rewards each epoch for contributing staked tokens to the liquidity pools of cooperative exchanges. Ordinary token holders can also receive incentives for early migration from RNDR (ETH) to RENDRE (ETH). In addition, given the network's growth goals, the distribution of rewards between specific stakeholders or new stakeholders that emerge in the operation of the network will remain adjustable to ensure that the work of value-added participants is compensated. Overall, the implementation of the new model will bring incentives to all parties involved in the ecosystem.
What impact will Render’s Solana upgrade have on the ecosystem?
Flexible and sustainable token economic model
After the introduction of the BME model, the RENDER token will gain more value support and will in fact switch to a deflationary mechanism. Compared with the old payment token model, the BME model has two main advantages:
RENDER will be treated as a commodity asset, more in line with the network’s long-term goal of establishing a tokenized computing standard.
When the network utilization rate reaches a certain load condition, RENDER will enter a deflationary mechanism and the value of the token will increase significantly.
Specifically, under the new model, when the demand for rendering tasks is insufficient, miners can get more income than before. 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 than the original model (burned tokens > newly minted tokens), and RENDER tokens will also enter a deflationary state.
Looking back at the operation of the Render Network, we can see that the rendering workload of the Render Network has increased by about 20-30% in the past 3 months. According to a report released by Insight Partners, the revenue of the visualization and 3D rendering software market is expected to reach US$11.83 billion by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of 20.3% from 2022 to 2030. In the next few years, as the adoption of multiple computing clients further stimulates the growth of users and traffic, it is expected to achieve the same scale as the current rendering market. The surge in business demand will trigger the destruction mechanism of the RENDER token and accelerate the deflation of the RENDER token.
Faster and more scalable networks
Render is already a mature project that processes millions of frames per year, and the requirements for the underlying L1 network are increasing. Migrating from Polygon to Solana will greatly help the expansion of Render's business in terms of underlying infrastructure, mainly in the following aspects:
In terms of transaction performance, the most intuitive data is TPS. The Ethereum mainnet has only about 14 TPS, and the real-time data of the Polygon mainnet shows that the TPS is about 130; and Solana's average TPS in the past month is more than 30 times that of Polygon, about 4000 TPS. Distributed rendering services require real-time networks, high hardware requirements for rendering, and interactive information transmission mechanisms, and need to synchronize node status on the chain to maintain a decentralized network. Therefore, L1 needs to have the ability to withstand pressure under large-scale and high loads, and meet the liquidity on and off the chain.
In terms of transaction costs, the Solana network has higher transaction throughput and lower transaction fees than Polygon. If we substitute the current data into the Render team's estimate, the rendering cost (i.e. transaction fee) for running the same number of frames on Solana is about a thousand times less than Polygon. Since the on-chain state synchronization of the Render network requires huge network traffic, transaction costs are also a core consideration.
In summary, Solana is faster and cheaper than Polygon, and is able to handle the broad vision of the Render Network. The Render Network is built with the goal of providing real-time, rendered, interactive holographic streams. This will require state to be dynamically updated in real time on-chain. To do this, the network needs to be able to write high-performance code both on-chain and on GPUs. 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 promising new stars in DePin, AI and digital copyright
Render is one of the benchmarks in the DePIN (distributed physical infrastructure network) track in the Web3 field. It provides hardware infrastructure for rendering, AI and other tracks, and is currently regarded as the Nvidia of the Web3 world. It can also be seen from the Coingecko market value data that Render is currently second only to the decentralized storage leader Filecoin in the DePin track, surpassing a number of old projects such as Arweave and Helium. In the context of the current explosion of AI applications, Render is one of the few projects that can continue to innovate and realize AI narratives. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is also another cutting-edge segment that Render focuses on. DRM realizes fast and low-cost multi-party royalty flows, which is very important for the monetization of next-generation streaming applications. In addition, by migrating to Solana, Render can also introduce DRM and royalties for complex 3D assets, IP and AI works on the chain, and can be rewarded accordingly if they contribute to the training set.
At present, whether in terms of business scenarios or economic models, Render has more obvious growth potential and imagination space than Filecoin. In the future, it is expected to catch up with Filecoin and become a leader in DePIN, AI and DRM.
Render is currently second only to Filecoin in the DePIN track / Source: Coingecko
Looking into the future from explosive growth
Since April this year, the Render business has entered a period of rapid growth. The number of rendering tasks in April reached a record high of 179,500, which is a 10-fold exponential growth compared to the previous months. Up to now, the average number of rendering tasks per month has exceeded 120,000, and the number is still growing, showing the explosiveness of the Render business. The main reasons are as follows:
The parent company OTOY (an authoritative American cloud rendering company) has a partnership with Apple. The Render network logo has appeared many times in Apple's official promotional videos. Octane X supports Macs and iPads equipped with M1, M2 and the latest M3 high-performance chips. In the future, Render may become a built-in rendering component of Apple software.
Recently, a partnership with Stable Diffusion was established, and Render can be used to generate 3D images and video rendering scenes through large language models.
Render Monthly rendering tasks show explosive growth / Source: Dune
Render has long been a leader in the decentralized rendering field, relying on the powerful rendering technology of its parent company OTOY. However, Render has always been pursuing innovation and iteration of products and technologies. The innovation of the token economic model and the migration to Solana are both for better cloud rendering services in the future.
In addition, Render is also undergoing more innovative upgrades, such as the latest Proposal 007 plans to introduce the FEDML cloud platform, with the aim of introducing AI community needs into Render's computing network. FEDML's GPU market can include Render, enabling AI developers to seamlessly access 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. In addition, at the recent Solana Breakpoint 2023 conference, Render also announced that it would provide users with multiple renderers, adding Maxon's Redshift, Physical, and Standard renderers.
These series of fruitful actions can ensure that Render will maintain a high narrative continuity in the future. The commercialization of AI has just opened the valve, and AI-related fields such as AR and VR are also ready to go. In the future, there will inevitably be a continuous high demand for distributed GPU computing networks such as Render; DFG is one of the early investors in Render Network and continues to be optimistic about the product and technological progress of the project. We believe that Render Network is fully prepared to lead a large-scale decentralized rendering revolution.
