Have you ever found yourself frustrated by your computer’s struggle to handle heavy tasks like editing photos or videos? Meet Render, your game-changing solution for processing the most demanding tasks seamlessly.
Render, also known by the market ticker RNDR, is a distributed GPU rendering service that lives on the Ethereum blockchain.
If you need additional GPU rendering power for a project, Render aims to be the platform that helps by introducing you to their GPU mining partners that can provide the extra computational power to you.
You can think of Render as a GPU-based power-on-demand service, with Render being the intermediary between buyer and supplier.
But, how exactly does this all work? And what makes Render unique?
What is Render?
Render was founded by Jules in 2017 and is designed to perform an array of computational tasks, from basic image rendering up to aiding in artificial intelligence.
In short, the Render network allows GPU owners to generate extra revenue from otherwise idle GPUs by offering them a platform where they can loan their GPU power to creators in need of it.
Naturally, putting it on the blockchain provides the usual benefits of reliability, trust, and having an immutable record for accounting and auditing purposes, and perhaps most importantly, ensuring everyone gets paid exactly what they need to be paid.
Partially to ensure those principles of speed, autonomy, and accountability, Render decided to launch their RNDR token on the already well-established and well-utilized Ethereum network as an ERC-20 token.
The benefit of this was the development and deployment of the blockchain had already been thoroughly tested by Ethereum and its users, ensuring security and reliability for Render and its network.
On top of this, as the Ethereum network, in particular, is already highly popular with developers and users, Render did not have to spend as many resources on promotion.
This is a plus as it is more time and energy that can be put into making the best product possible, well, at least in theory.
But how does Render work exactly?
How does Render work?
As Render is an ERC-20 token, it behaves like most of the other ERC-20 tokens I have talked about previously.
But, to quickly make sure we’re all on the same page.
An ERC-20 token is a type of token standardization blueprint that ensures compatibility with the Ethereum network.
The main benefit here is high liquidity, given the size of the Ethereum network the ERC-20 RNDR tokens can easily be converted into ETH, which can be easily converted into pretty much any other currency you can imagine.
Because an ERC-20 token aims to ensure compatibility with the Ethereum network, this also means that Render is a Proof-of-Stake platform.
Proof-of-Stake is the more energy-efficient, “younger cousin” of Bitcoin’s more famous Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism.
The main difference between the two is under Proof-of-Work the nodes on the network compete to solve a complex mathematical equation, where whoever does so first unlocks the Bitcoin reward and also verifies the transactions of the network.
While very secure, this is slow and energy-intensive.
Proof-of-Stake networks on the other hand select validators semi-randomly to verify transactions based on how much they have staked, meaning deposited, to the network.
It then semi-randomly selects a few verifiers to ensure the accuracy of the validator.
The consequences are that Proof-of-Stake projects are much more scalable, quicker to confirm transactions, and result in a fraction of the energy consumption when compared with Proof-of-Work.
What makes Render unique?
The short answer is ORBX.
ORBX is an open-source file format that is designed to encode all elements of a 3D scene and allows for easy transfer between platforms.
But to understand why that’s important, I need to quickly break down what rendering is.
Simply put, rendering is the process of creating an image with a computer. The more intensive the image, the more computing power that is required.
For example, creating a large photorealistic image is quite intensive and can take hours for the computer to produce.
Now imagine rendering the CGI that is required for making Hollywood movies and imagine how intensive and many more hours it must take to complete.
When we have projects as large as creating an entire city in a movie, instead of making one computer work for a very long time, Render allows you to find idle GPUs on the network that can lend their computing power to help speed up the rendering process.
What ORBX does is allow these files needing rendering to be read on the computer that is providing you the additional GPU power.
In short, it is ORBX that provides convenience to the project as it allows for the easy transfer of data across multiple GPU-providing participants.
But how about the Tokenomics?
RNDR Tokenomics
RNDR can be used for all the Proof-of-Stake classics like staking, governance, and payments of services, such as buying or selling GPU power.
In total, just under 537 million RNDR tokens will be available, with over 117 million making up the current circulation.
The total supply breaks down as follows.
Around 25% was sold during investment rounds.
A further 10% is held in the RNDR Reserve, with the RNDR Reserve being, as the name implies, a reserve of RNDR tokens.
This reserve hasn’t all been fully allocated presently but a part of this reserve will be set towards user acquisition.
Then, the final 65% is held in escrow through a third-party custody account for the supply and demand flowback to the network.
To explain, as the network scales, more RNDR tokens will need to be released into the ecosystem to keep it operational.
These tokens will come through either the RNDR Reserve or the 65% held in escrow and will enter the ecosystem through the Render Reserve as user acquisitions, bonuses for node operators, or airdrops.
Until these funds have been allocated they sit in a secure third-party account where no one can misappropriate them in the meantime.
The future of Render
Render provides a legitimate service for those rendering highly demanding images or data sets.
This is only likely to become more important as we move further into the future, assuming rendering times continue to increase as the complexity of what is being created increases.
Of course, that isn’t a guarantee of anything.
But it does solve a legitimate real-world problem, and if it can convince others to join its rendering network, it certainly seems possible the best days for the project could still likely lay ahead.