Participants:

Silvia Lacayo — Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation
Tristan Relly — Head of Operations, Render Network Foundation
Trevor Harries-Jones — Board Member, Render Network Foundation
Sunny Osahn — Ecosystem Lead, Render Network Foundation
Bob Miles — Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies
Kyle Dodson — CTO, Salad Technologies

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

The Road to Integration refers to the recently passed RNP-023 governance proposal that brings Render Network to Salad as their onchain payments layer. Real quickly, I’m Silvia Lacayo, Head of Marketing and Communications at Render Network Foundation. We’ve got the Salad team here, the Render Network team too.

We will be talking about the integration roadmap at a high level, and why we’re excited about what we’re building together. If you have been following along, you’ve probably seen some integration announcements already.

Today, we’re gonna go a little deeper into the details, but we’re also gonna zoom out and talk about the broader compute landscape — from AI demand, GPU shortages, why distributed compute networks are having a bit of a moment now, and more.

Feel free to drop your questions in the comments. Sunny and I will be checking those periodically. Sunny, do you want to say hi for anyone who just joined?

Sunny Osahn Ecosystem Lead, Render Network Foundation

Everybody, how is it going? I am Sunny from the Render Network Foundation. Some of you may be familiar with my voice from other spaces that we have held. I look after our grants program here at the foundation. So if you’re a 3D artist or somebody looking for GPU compute power, definitely get in touch.

And anybody listening to this on the replay, you are also more than welcome to leave some comments or questions or DM. We will absolutely get back to you as well.

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

All right. So with that, let’s get everybody else introduced and then we’ll jump right in. Let’s start with Bob Miles on the Salad team and we’re going to work our way around from there. Bob?

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

Thanks Silvia. Yep, this is Bob here. I’m the founder and CEO of Salad and this is actually my first X-Space. So I’m very excited to be here and cover all of those topics.

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

Excellent. Kyle, are you able to do a quick intro?

Kyle Dodson CTO, Salad Technologies

Yes, hello. I’m Kyle Dodson. I’m the CTO at Salad. And also, first time here on an X-Space, but very excited to keep this conversation going. I know I got to meet several people when we were discussing RNP-023 and excited to give some updates.

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

Excellent. Yeah, it was really good to meet you in person. It’s the benefit of in real life events like RenderCon. All right, let’s move on to Tristan Relly. Do you want to do a quick intro?

[Note: Tristan Relly’s intro audio was cut off. Silvia then introduces Trevor Harris Jones.]

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

Trevor Harris-Jones is a board member of Render Network Foundation. We can let him do a bit of a deeper dive when we get started with the first question. Let’s just dive right in.

— RNP-023 & Onchain Payments —

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

This is for you, Bob. So RNP-023 is all about bringing Render Network through the Render token as an onchain payments layer for Salad. Why don’t you give us a little bit of a background — why it’s important to move towards an onchain payments system and reward system instead of launching a standalone token?

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

Yeah, so we’ve been operating a distributed cloud for eight years now. And one of the main points of friction that we’ve really come to feel in our business operations is payment processes — legacy payment processes, centralized web2 payment processes that exist today. That’s the tooling that runs our infrastructure, runs all the transactions under the hood.

We have thousands of nodes, tens of thousands of nodes that are distributed across 180 different countries across the globe. And equally on the other side of our marketplace, we have hundreds of customers that also come from all corners of the globe. It was about this time last year that we hit a scale where we really started to recognize the friction and the pain that comes with running across a global footprint.

Just to anchor this in an example: we use Stripe today to collect a lot of payments for our customers. Obviously the internet is full of fraudsters trying to get free services. Using Stripe, there is tooling called Radar to help take against that. But what we found is that tooling is inadequate, it’s a very blunt instrument, it leads to a lot of false positives. That’s a lot of lost revenue for us and for our suppliers. And it was mid last year, we hit the scale where we really started to recognize that this is an issue for the business as we continue to scale. That’s when Kyle and I really started to look to crypto payments as a solution to this problem.

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

We dove in pretty deep. We came to learn on that journey that there’s a lot more potential than simply payments. But it was certainly the first problem that brought us to crypto payments. In the RNP, there are three milestones. The first two relate to Render payouts for our providers — we call them chefs — and RENDER payments for our customers. We quietly shipped crypto and RENDER payments a few weeks ago. And already we’ve come to learn that a lot of those points of friction are solved through onchain crypto payments.

We’ve seen already a handful of people pay for our compute services in RENDER, so we’re really excited about where this goes, really excited to give you an update on our progress, and we’re really starting to see the benefits of accepting these payments, alongside the legacy rails that we have today.

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

Well folks, you heard it here first — they’ve already shipped a payments option — which is always great to get this kind of insight, and I don’t want to say alpha because that’s such a loaded word, but basically yes — you have now heard some of the progress the team here is making.

Bob, before I move on to the rest of the team, can I ask you to tell us a little bit about what drove the inflection point in the last year that you mentioned, and I guess we can all say AI and compute jobs, but that feels a little broad; maybe give us some color about what was driving that for you guys?

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

Yeah, I’ll shorten the timeframe there and really say the last month. It’s obviously been growing over the past year, and years now, as AI proliferates. We’ve all seen it in the public stock market with AI stocks and earnings report and just the massive build out that’s going into supply to support AI and the amount of tokens that there is demand for.

The inflection point that we really noticed was the release of OpenClaw late last year — that ushered in this new era of agentic AI, which is a very different profile in terms of how tokens are consumed, certainly how many tokens are consumed, it’s an order of magnitude more than a human who is limited by the input and output by typing or speaking to a chatbot. An agent can spawn out so many more requests and consume so many more tokens for accomplishing either the same task or a much greater task.

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

We’ve all seen the AI budget blowouts in the headlines the past couple of months. Large organizations like Uber went through their annual AI budget in a matter of months. That has forced a lot of these enterprise businesses to reconsider that spend and start to think through what is a more efficient way of embracing AI without breaking the budget.

It’s really only the last couple of months where we have seen demand absolutely sky rocket for our profile compute — smaller GPUs constrained by VRAM on those consumer GPUs that limits the model size which can run — we don’t support SOTA state of the art models which have tens of billions, hundreds of trillions parameters. It’s really only the past few months that people have started to have that sticker shock from the cost of running AI on SOTA models, and they’ve started to look for alternatives — how can you route certain workloads, particularly agentic tasks, to smaller purpose-built models that are equally capable of publishing the same task or delivering the same output — that trend really accelerated the last couple of months.

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

The last month for us, we’ve been in a condition we’ve never been in before where demand has outstripped the amount of supply that we have on our network. This profile of demand is really something that can only be met by what is an enormous pool of compute resources — internet connected devices that are idle. It really takes that distributed model to bring that supply online so that it can meet the growing demand.

Trevor Harries-Jones Board Member, Render Network Foundation

Hi Silvia. Hi everybody. Apologies, I got caught by the spaces glitch there, but it looks like I’m back up and running. I’m a huge fan of the Salad team and actually love this topic. So really excited to be jumping in here today.

— Render Network’s Strategic Perspective —

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

Let’s hear from Tristan Relly — can you share the perspective from the Render side of the equation? Why was Salad strategically important to the Render Network ecosystem at this time?

Tristan Relly Head of Operations, Render Network Foundation

Absolutely. Thanks. And Bob, that was a fantastic overview. So yeah, from a Render perspective, Bob and his team reached out to us as an effort to solve the problems around payments that Bob was talking about. From a Render perspective, it works well strategically for a few reasons.

Render, when one really drills down at its essence, is an infrastructure layer for a decentralized economy. There are subnets that use the Render infrastructure — and that’s what is really at play here for Salad. Where Salad works well for Render is that they’re also a decentralized GPU network, they have established, proven paying customers and usage from Salad’s marketplace. So once the integration into the Render ecosystem is complete, that will drive immediate onchain activity.

And once fully integrated, will include Render burns and increase token utility, particularly around the payments and rewards side.

Tristan Relly Head of Operations, Render Network Foundation

There are some other aspects that we also like about Salad. They’re a product-led team, and they’re operating as a front runner in the emerging GPU space — testing agentic use cases, running them on their own GPUs, really dog-feeding their own ideas. That alongside an active revenue growth plan with a strong customer pipeline are all good signals. And Salad doesn’t have its own native token, so there’s no competing back-end infrastructure that softens the overlap. We think there is a really meaningful synergy here that works well for both Salad and Render.

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

Yep, totally agree. Actually, I want to get Kyle in here to give us a perspective on the product side. But right before that — Trevor, anything to add here that Tristan Relly hasn’t touched on?

Trevor Harries-Jones Board Member, Render Network Foundation

Yeah, sure. Thanks. Well, a couple of things. To me, the deal was very much about scale — bringing exponentially more nodes to the network overall and more revenue was definitely enticing. I really view this deal as almost the compute client’s version two. We went through trying a different format with some other partners.

What stands out here to me, I agree with Tristan Relly on the competing token — but above and beyond that, I think the community did a great job structuring this around onchain revenue as a KPI. And I think that is a great innovation and a good structure to put us in as we look out towards potentially other subnets and partners.

— Product & Technical Perspective —

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

All right, I actually want to dive into onchain payments a bit more. Kyle, if you have the opportunity, walk us through from a product or technology perspective — what is this promising to unlock for you guys? And it’s totally fine to be honest about what challenges you’re foreseeing as you onboard onchain rails.

Kyle Dodson CTO, Salad Technologies

Yeah, the promise of what it brings really goes back to where this conversation started — looking at where this space was going, and today it’s pretty clear everybody can see it, right? This explosion of agentic workloads, and the legacy payment systems just don’t work. They don’t really scale. They push people into business models and workflows that lead to other problems downstream.

Render has built existing infrastructure — it’s accelerated for us, right? That exists, this community exists. It’s something that now we can build on top of and integrate with — that ecosystem is already there. So bringing that in now allows us to facilitate these use cases that really just haven’t made sense and aren’t working as they’ve been scaling.

Kyle Dodson CTO, Salad Technologies

We have a lot of customers coming from web2 backgrounds. It’s really now about bringing this bridge where web2 customers can come in and continue to use this distributed infrastructure layer onchain as we integrate and build this out on top of the Render Network’s infrastructure. The challenge is getting all those dots aligned with the rapid pace at which tools, agents, and infrastructure are being built.

Kyle Dodson CTO, Salad Technologies

Having the APIs, the onchain data, and really being able to see and drive this forward — I anticipate it will help Salad, but also more broadly speaking, the Render Network, as far as demonstrating that these distributed decentralized systems are scalable, they work, and they are handling actual enterprise jobs.

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

The other day I was trying to explain how I send and receive payments onchain to some folks who had never tried it themselves. For them it wasn’t necessarily clicking. So there are sort of apps or layers on top of the existing rails, but underneath it, there’s a lot of inefficiencies. Kyle, could you paint a picture for the audience as to what some of those inefficiencies are?

Kyle Dodson CTO, Salad Technologies

Yes. A lot of legacy payment solutions take a lot of time — sometimes weeks for settlement for various transactions. When you have a customer who’s ready to scale up, it gets into the weeds of business processes. All of these providers — our chefs — distributed machines running all over the world — those providers get paid for operating that. We can get stuck waiting on the speed of traditional institutions just being able to send and reconcile transactions, which with Render Network’s infrastructure obviously doesn’t exist — it happens so fast that we can get to a state of being productive quickly.

Kyle Dodson CTO, Salad Technologies

Fees are also a huge factor. In traditional payment rails, fees scale quickly. When you pay by credit card, vendors are just marking up their services to account for these additional fees that intermediaries are taking. Being able to bring those fees down is hugely impactful.

With agentic use cases specifically, it pushes companies into models where people need to do very large bulk purchases of credits just to work around that — more capital locked up just to work around legacy rail problems.

Kyle Dodson CTO, Salad Technologies

It’s not just on the customer side. We also have the providers — the chefs. Similar types of issues exist. Providers earn rewards and they’re looking for rewards that are valuable and easily convertible to other forms of value. Render is plugged into infrastructure that provides various opportunities for the providers. We’ve had a lot of providers ask us in the past — they’re really interested in holding tokens, participating in the economies that exist there. This gives us that door into that.

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

You mentioned in your question there, you were chatting to a couple of friends and this friction is not something we really experience in the developed world. But if you take that same pain point and apply it to agents — a wave that we see forming is: how do agents go and pay for different services? In our case, GPU compute cycles. They can’t go and KYC with a bank and get a credit card themselves. And all of that friction that Kyle just described is not compatible with an agentic world where you have ‘millions, tens of millions, billions of these agents interacting online.’ You really need a different payment rail — Render, Solana, or something like that — to facilitate a lot of these smaller rapid transactions.

— What Changes for Node Operators / Chefs —

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

Can you walk us through specifically what changes for Node Operators?

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

Yes, so there are three milestones as part of this RNP. Milestone one and two — that’s Render payouts for chefs, and Render payments for customers. Those are relatively trivial. As I mentioned, payments has already shipped. Chef Render rewards is built, it’s just in testing, so we’re measuring that in weeks until that goes live.

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

We want to publish our integration plans — the how we go and accomplish that — in the coming weeks. While the cost of making any changes is low, before we go and pick up the tools and start building this, it’s a very big integration. We can get feedback from the Render community and also from our chefs.

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

When RNP was approved a couple of months ago, we did hear from our chefs — those are our compute suppliers. They did have concerns. A lot of these are gamers — they are not even crypto adjacent, they are in a different world altogether, and they’re used to very stable earnings from their compute resources. We have to really think about how do we preserve that experience with them whilst delivering on what’s required in that RNP.

We’ve got some really compelling ideas around how we scratch that itch for our chefs. Many of them really are so far from the crypto space they’re not even aware of the benefits that can come here.

— Macro Opportunity & Compute Landscape —

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

Tristan, I wanted to engage with you on the opportunity at a macro level. What can this unlock for other industries, and why is compute particularly interesting for the segment we’re in?

Tristan Relly Head of Operations, Render Network Foundation

Yeah, super interesting. The opportunity is very broad. It starts off with any compute load that could be run in a containerized environment. And as these use cases evolve — which is happening fairly quickly — the use cases shift. For example, if we went back 12 months, the idea of using a distributed network for AI model training really didn’t make any sense. But fast forward 12 months and we’ve actually built a pilot for training a Gaussian splat model — it demonstrates that training can work in a distributed environment.

Tristan Relly Head of Operations, Render Network Foundation

Another filter: what are the jobs that don’t require extreme machine-to-machine speed and can operate with a few milliseconds of additional latency? AI inference fits that bill. And then: not everybody wants their data fed into one of the larger AI businesses for privacy reasons, and they want to run their own model. The decentralized environment allows you to access compute and set up your own model and run your inference inside an environment you control with your own encryption.

Tristan Relly Head of Operations, Render Network Foundation

From there it expands to potentially a Cambrian explosion of opportunities. You could set up an app store that draws compute from decentralized networks and allows people to access bespoke models that make usage more accessible. There are also very interesting use cases around breaking up workloads for high-security industries — for example, the banking industry has financial information it wouldn’t want to run on a decentralized network, but it also has to process large volumes of publicly available information around rules and regulations in different jurisdictions. Those workloads can be done on a distributed network.

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

You saying that right now, Tristan, reminds me of exactly a year ago. We were at Permissionless in New York City and Trevor was talking about a brand new study that had just come out about how it actually is possible to train models on decentralized networks.

Fast forward 12 months, Trevor — do you think that the capabilities possible on decentralized networks, coupled with onchain payments as the layer that reduces friction, is gaining traction?

Trevor Harries-Jones Board Member, Render Network Foundation

Well, I think there’s definitely compute traction as a whole first. The growth that you’ve seen on state-of-the-art providers — Anthropic’s growth, OpenAI’s growth — is absolutely staggering. But when you dig a little bit deeper, one of the really interesting stats: 60% of OpenRouter’s traffic had moved from more traditional US providers to open-weight, lower-cost Chinese models. And when you look at the makeup of those models, in many ways they’ve taken those papers we were talking about a year ago and have built on them, doing some amazing things in terms of making them possible to run on consumer hardware.

Trevor Harries-Jones Board Member, Render Network Foundation

People realize that you don’t need to use the state-of-the-art model for every calculation. In fact, for the vast majority of calculations, a cheaper model that can run on a decentralized node may be a better choice. Where I see the industry as a whole now is really needing to open up and educate around those aspects — and you’re seeing it emerge as agents come to the fore. The great thing from the crypto perspective is that a lot of that focus has been on the crypto-agentic intersection, which I think is really exciting and quite important.

— Crypto Natives? The Salad Team’s Journey —

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

Bob and Kyle, were you guys crypto natives before we started talking?

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

I certainly followed the space, but a lot of this is very new to me. It was really that moment a year ago where we did an audit of friction for our customers, and our legacy payment rails really stuck out. That’s when we started exploring other options and diving more deeply into the space. I won’t speak for Kyle, but I wouldn’t call him a crypto native yet.

Kyle Dodson CTO, Salad Technologies

Yes, that’s a fair way I think to describe where I’m at on that curve — not a crypto native yet. When I joined Salad, we started really in that heyday of mining — and that came with, when Bob founded the company, the start of seeing that there was this explosive demand for computational power that was going to outstrip supply. It’s been a long bet, but it keeps showing and it keeps coming up.

Kyle Dodson CTO, Salad Technologies

We started working with the Golem Network team, kind of testing some of these ideas and thinking about where things go. And really for me, that was the very eye-opening experience of diving deep and really seeing these things that I had learned and knowledge accumulated over the past several years, but now really thinking forward to all those challenges I was talking about before. Things didn’t pan out the way we wanted with Golem Network, but chatting with the Render Foundation — it just makes so much sense. I am moving on my way towards crypto native.

— Q&A — Audience Questions —

Sunny Osahn Ecosystem Lead, Render Network Foundation

Thank you so much for sharing that perspective, Kyle. Let’s see if we’ve got any questions from the audience. We do have one question from Jay — a longtime supporter of the Render Network. His question: ‘Where do you see overlaps and where do you see competition between Salad and Dispersed? I understand that they are two different providers, but if both use the same rails — i.e. Render — which provider should an operator join, and will the reward level ultimately be the deciding factor?’

Trevor Harries-Jones Board Member, Render Network Foundation

Jay, lots in that. I think yes, there are two services in Dispersed and Salad offering similar compute offerings. But when I think about their acquisition strategies, most of it is very much inbound — they’re not necessarily targeting a similar group of customers with overlapping sales teams. So I haven’t seen a ton of inbound overlap.

But when we think about the node side, one of the areas that really excited me about having these subnets was the ability for spillover. We were hearing from Salad that they’ve shifted from a challenge of finding enough revenue to finding enough nodes. In that circumstance, it would be great to have Dispersed really be the overflow for those nodes if they can’t source them themselves, and vice versa on elastic type jobs. So I’d hope to see deeper and deeper integration between the various subnets as time goes by.

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

Yeah, it’s actually a conversation we’ve had recently with others at Render — how do we think about this overflow capacity? We’re very focused on the RNP at the moment, but I can see us walking towards a future where that actually works to favor both Dispersed and Salad. There’s a slightly different offering in terms of the target persona on the supply side. But I definitely see those synergies that you described, Trevor.

Sunny Osahn Ecosystem Lead, Render Network Foundation

Thank you, Trevor and Bob, for the answer. Jay, I hope that kind of answered your question. I think to finish things up, we are going to finish off with a lightning round.

— Lightning Round — Exciting Use Cases —

Sunny Osahn Ecosystem Lead, Render Network Foundation

What is it that you are excited for in terms of use cases? Let’s go with Bob first.

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

Distributed training. It’s definitely in the research category right now, but it is starting to get a lot of traction. We have a customer in that space. We’re very excited about the demand that we can bring beyond just inference.

Trevor Harries-Jones Board Member, Render Network Foundation

I’m really excited that we’re moving splat training onto decentralized nodes. What we see in the current year is really the convergence of AI creation and traditional creation. Splats are such an important part of that — they’re a format that allow you to move seamlessly back and forth between them. It’s even a central piece on Apple Maps. Very excited that training aspect is something we can do on decentralized GPUs.

Tristan Relly Head of Operations, Render Network Foundation

Yeah, I think I mentioned it earlier — the decentralized training, just because it’s the frontier of what could be done here, is a real draw. It’s really cool to look at the case studies that were presented at RenderCon — for example, live risk tracking for satellite insurance. And there are really interesting use cases around breaking up workloads for high-security industries.

Kyle Dodson CTO, Salad Technologies

Yes, one use case that I get very excited about on a personal level is actually drug discovery and simulation — medicine, human health. The idea of how we can accelerate finding cures and solutions to diseases. The timelines to actually test and demonstrate efficacy are being condensed. The change of pace and the progression we’re seeing there is a space that just gets me really, really excited.

Sunny Osahn Ecosystem Lead, Render Network Foundation

I think if that were ever going to be a network in itself, it should be called the Mycelium Network. I’m going to hand over to Silvia.

— Closing —

Sunny Osahn Ecosystem Lead, Render Network Foundation

Thank you, Sunny. And I couldn’t agree more with Kyle. In fact, one of the case studies we saw on Dispersed had to do with improving replicability of scientific studies using compute. In some ways, nothing is more important than our health. So I think that’s a great place to wrap things up.

Huge thanks to everyone from the Salad team, the Render Network team, and everybody who tuned in. This was the first stop on the Road to Integration and we’ve got plenty more to share in the weeks and months ahead. If you’re not already doing so, make sure to follow both Render Network and Salad on various channels — X, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. — for future updates. We appreciate you being here and will see you at the next one.

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

Thank you everyone. Take care now.

Render Network x Salad Technologies: Road to Integration (Part 1) was originally published in Render Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ecosystem metrics

The Render Network Foundation tracks various metrics on its network. Below is the aggregate view of the month’s activity, previous month’s activity, and month-over-month change for a few key metrics.

Looking for definitions of each of these terms? Check out our previous monthly reports.

Product updates

Dispersed gets both Global and Windows OS Node Support, plus Website Updates

For Dispersed, the distributed compute network launched specifically for AI workloads, we’re now onboarding Windows OS GPUs now (in addition to Linux). If you’ve got a high performance GPU you’d like to put on the network, apply here.

We’re also accepting node applications from countries beyond the US or Canada.

For details on hardware specs and rewards, read RNP-021.

If you previously applied, we will be reviewing your application.

If you’re a builder, you might be pleased to know that we’ve recently added functionality that allows you to select the region they’d like to hire GPUs from.

Lastly, check out the newly added pages and content to the website, including a Product page, an About Us page, and a Resources page where you can read through our blog announcements, case studies, and more.

Render Network Product Updates

Manager App Enhancements

The Render Network Manager App received two releases in May, delivering a range of usability improvements, download workflow enhancements, and bug fixes designed to streamline the rendering experience.

Version 1.48.24 introduced significant upgrades to the downloads workflow, including bulk download functionality for selected jobs, download path validation, disk space verification, automatic retries for failed downloads, and the ability to prioritize downloading first and last frames.

New options such as “Skip Existing Frames” help users avoid unnecessary downloads and improve efficiency when managing large projects.

The release also improved the Open Cloud Storage (OCS) workflow, adding asset compression progress tracking, notifications for missing assets during hashing, and relocating hashed asset lists to a more accessible scene details view. Additional updates included support for displaying the latest render engine and plugin versions during job creation, improved folder naming for downloaded outputs, enhanced cross-platform drive handling, performance optimizations for projects with large frame counts, and clearer error reporting for API scope issues.

Version 1.48.31 followed with targeted fixes to the downloads system, resolving issues that could cause incorrect file formats to be saved to output folders and ensuring output lists reset properly after selective downloads.

Together, these updates continue to improve reliability, visibility, and efficiency across the rendering workflow.

Insydium Fused for Cinema 4D Now Available

Following a successful beta period announced at RenderCon 2026, support for the Insydium Fused package for Cinema 4D is now generally available on Render Network.

Cinema 4D creators can now render projects using the full Insydium Fused toolset, including X-Particles and other Fused modules, expanding the range of supported creative workflows available on the network.

Expanded Cloud Storage Integrations

Render Network has expanded its Cloud Storage Uploads feature with support for both Google Drive and Amazon S3.

Users can now connect Dropbox, Google Drive, or S3 storage to automatically upload scenes to the network through watch folders, simplifying project management and reducing manual file transfer steps. These additions provide greater flexibility for studios, teams, and individual creators working across a variety of cloud storage environments.

Artist Spotlight Number 1: Kasper Steernberg

Kasper Steernberg is a 3D artist and designer who has created visuals for artists like Victoria Monét, Marshmello, Tiesto, Jonna Fraser, and Zedd.

For one of his latest projects, Kasper created a series of intricate, neon-sign inspired stage visuals for Cardi B’s Little Miss Drama tour, rendered on Render Network:

Watch the full stage visual animation:

Check out Kasper’s Instagram for more of his work.

Artist Spotlight Number 2: Lit Candle

Render Network Foundation grant recipient Adnan of Lit Candle recently released a stunning cinematic reinterpretation of the original Need for Speed: Underground trailer, showcasing the level of craftsmanship possible with modern 3D workflows powered by Render Network.

Eight months in the making, the project features meticulously rebuilt vehicle assets, custom rain and atmospheric simulations in Houdini, look development and lighting in Blender and OctaneRender, and fully in-house sound design and color grading. Created as a tribute to the video game franchise that inspired Adnan’s journey into 3D, the piece reflects a commitment to technical excellence, manual artistry, and creative dedication.

The project serves as both a technical showcase and a celebration of a decade of growth as a 3D artist, with Render Network helping make the final cinematic vision possible.

Check out the trailer:

Announcements

SUBMERGE: Beyond the Render Case Study Now Available

In May we published our SUBMERGE: Beyond the Render case study. This case study is the most in-depth and technically detailed behind-the-scenes look we’ve ever published. The 18K, cinematic-quality exhibit is the largest immersive experience ever rendered on the decentralized Render Network.

The case study dives deep into the project’s production pipeline, covering everything from asset creation and scene optimization to rendering strategy and infrastructure considerations. It covers a lot of ground, from practical realities of producing high-end animated content to how decentralized GPU rendering can help creators scale ambitious projects without compromising quality.

Whether you’re an independent artist, creative studio, or production team, the case study walks through how decentralized rendering can support demanding 3D, animation, VFX, and digital content workflows.

Interested in using Render Network for your own cinematic, animation, VFX, or 3D graphics projects? Reach out to the team (on X, Instagram, LinkedIn or via email). We’d love to explore how we can support your next production.

RenderCon 2026 sessions are now available on demand

All 23 sessions from RenderCon 2026, the two-day event that bright together artists, technologists, and builders in April, are now available to watch on demand.

Check out the sessions:

16 artists rendered 18K digital art for a 270-degree space in 2 months

Any artist working in immersive media production frequently encounters a linear hardware bottleneck. ARTECHOUSE NYC is an immersive gallery that features an 18K resolution, 270-degree panoramic canvas with a higher pixel density than even the colossal Sphere in Las Vegas — one of the most advanced 16K LED displays. In this environment, the hardware bottleneck constrains creativity.

Until now, producing high-fidelity content for an environment of this nature required many months of production time. The majority of such a cycle is consumed by the latency of serial rendering on local workstations or centralized farms.

SUBMERGE: Beyond the Render was designed to change this. By using the decentralized GPU power of Render Network, 16 world-class artists simultaneously delivered 18K resolution, cinema-quality immersive works in a fraction of the typical timeline.

The exhibition demonstrates a fundamental shift in the production model, moving from restricted local workstations to a global, parallelized rendering infrastructure. This allows studios to compress months of production into weeks or even days, while substantially reducing the high costs associated with mainstream rendering solutions.

The Challenge in Rendering Multiple Pieces at 18K Resolution

Since its founding in 2015, ARTECHOUSE has focused on creating immersive, technology-driven art experiences that exist between cinema, installation, and spatial computing. ARTECHOUSE’s flagship is located in a 100-year-old boiler room beneath Chelsea Market; the architectural space became a seamless canvas that spans three walls and the floor, reproducing the finest details in full resolution.

The key challenge of staging art on this scale is the computational cost.

When ARTECHOUSE NYC opened in 2019, it set a new benchmark with an 18K panoramic canvas, representing 44% more pixels than the famed 16K Las Vegas Sphere. Back in 2019, an artist producing a single long-form work at this scale would need up to a year using a typical local setup with a single 3090 GPU. Even for experienced studios, the combination of resolution, scene complexity, and long runtimes made immersive production slow, expensive, and operationally risky.

Render Network emerged in 2017 with the goal of unblocking these bottlenecks by providing distributed access to GPU for rendering. Artists and studios tap into on-demand compute at a price that’s affordable for studios and individual artists.

For ARTECHOUSE and the artists participating in SUBMERGE: Beyond the Render, this partnership was an opportunity to align output scale with rendering throughput. By treating extreme resolution as a baseline rather than a technical ambition, the collaboration sought to remove the boundaries of immersive media production.

The Stakes: Bringing Cinematic-Quality Immersive Art to NYC

SUBMERGE: Beyond the Render was conceived as a large-scale exhibition that showcases what becomes possible when creative ambition is untethered from rendering constraints.

The show brings together different creative approaches to 3D and immersive media rather than being curated around a single theme or template. 12 artist teams were invited to contribute works spanning cinematic world-building, generative systems, hyper-real environments, and abstract, atmospheric spaces.

“We envisioned SUBMERGE as a kind of window into the future of immersive mediums, showcasing a broad spectrum of creative, aesthetic, and technical approaches to spatial storytelling. There is something for everyone — from fully immersive SciFi and musical experiences to playful, contemplative, avant-garde, and ethereal artworks.”

— Phillip Gara, VP of Strategy, OTOY (Render Network ecosystem partner that collaborated on SUBMERGE)

However, the technical requirements were uncompromising. Every contribution had to be delivered at a full 18K resolution and for a 270-degree environment.

Content is normally produced at 4K resolution (about 8 million pixels per frame) or 8K resolution (about 33 million pixels per frame). For ARTECHOUSE’s 18K canvas, the pieces had to be rendered at about 95 million pixels per frame. That is about three times the image data of 8K without compromising fine detail, smooth gradients, complex lighting or simulation-heavy effects.

Crucially, all 12 artist submissions had to be created simultaneously on a two-month timeline from initial concept to final delivery — a feat that would have been impossible using traditional cloud or in-house rendering solutions.

This was the point at which Render Network’s role became foundational to production. For the artists, the impact was felt most directly in the creative iteration cycle.

“Some of these creators would not have taken this job if they couldn’t iterate at this speed. What would normally be a multi-week rendering marathon locally was condensed into days or even hours, changing the stakes in terms of creative freedom.”

– Riki Kim, Executive Creative Director at ARTECHOUSE

Render Network enabled the parallel rendering of 12 productions, comparable in quality to those shown on the Las Vegas Sphere.

The result was a production environment where 12 teams, using different tools and pipelines, could simultaneously work toward a common delivery target without flattening their ideas to fit narrow technical constraints.

Why Existing Rendering Solutions Fail

For a project of SUBMERGE’s scale, centralized rendering workflows would quickly stall due to technical limitations and cost-prohibitive infrastructure. The challenges with working at this scale are manifold.

Establishing a Quality Baseline. Large-format immersive visuals can be produced quickly using composited layers, stylized effects, or procedural graphics. But the 270-degree immersive space used for SUBMERGE demanded more than simply staging large-format production. When viewers are surrounded by an image, even small inconsistencies in lighting or depth can break the sense of realism. Maintaining immersion requires frames that behave like coherent physical scenes rather than flat visual compositions.

This required SUBMERGE to deliver fully rendered 3D environments where every frame preserves realistic lighting, reflections, shadows, and depth at full 18K resolution. From the get-go, the creative ambition for this exhibit was to be of cinematic-level quality.

Creating Hollywood-grade content is computationally intensive. Traditional rendering infrastructure struggles to deliver the required quality at scale.

Local GPU workstations cannot render scenes of this complexity fast enough, and centralized render farms become prohibitively expensive when multiple teams need to iterate simultaneously. Without access to massively parallel GPU compute, maintaining this visual standard across every project would make the production timeline unworkable.

The Burden of Infrastructure Ownership. For high-fidelity 3D scenes involving dense geometry, advanced shading, volumetrics, and simulation, rendering at 18K resolution requires access to hundreds — often thousands — of high-performance GPUs operating in parallel. For high-impact, one-time events, it doesn’t make financial sense for a studio or production organization to invest in the massive hardware required to render such complex scenes.

While hyperscalers such as AWS allow renting, they essentially require users to “buy” infrastructure for a set period, paying for the GPU regardless of whether they’re using 10% or 100%.

Prohibitive Enterprise Pricing. Cloud rendering services often rely on enterprise-grade GPUs such as NVIDIA’s A-series to comply with data center commercial terms. These cards are priced at significant multiples of consumer-grade hardware — a cost that is passed directly to the user, creating a massive barrier to entry for boutique teams.

VRAM and Complexity Ceiling. Standard local workstations and even many mid-tier render farms would hit a hard limit on Video RAM (VRAM) when handling SUBMERGE’s massive 18K assets. When a scene’s complexity exceeds the memory capacity of a single machine, the render either fails or slows to a crawl, creating a barrier that prevents artists from realizing the full detail of their vision.

Ingestion and Licensing Bottlenecks. Centralized cloud solutions require a setup that adds significant friction. Artists must often set up Docker containers, manage complex remote licensing for each Digital Content Creation (DCC) tool, and provide credentials for every third-party plugin. This technical learning curve diverts time and energy away from actual creative production.

The Iteration Bottleneck. With a total project timeline of only two months, the established “upload-render-download” cycle of farms becomes a fatal bottleneck. Because existing solutions require a new upload of the entire rendering file for each change, however minor, the constant back-and-forth iterations required for a 95-megapixel project would have consumed the entire production schedule.

In a typical “staggered” pipeline, rendering is a final, separate step that can take days or weeks. This limits the rapid iteration required for a world-class immersive experience. Without the ability to render in parallel across hundreds of nodes, even minor adjustments to lighting or shading could set the project back by days.

How Render Network Delivered for SUBMERGE

For the SUBMERGE project, Render Network didn’t just provide more rendering power. It fundamentally changed the mechanics of the production pipeline in several ways, delivering benefits that turned the project from vision to reality. Specifically:

• 12 artists worked in parallel over 8 weeks
• 18K resolution across a 270-degree panoramic canvas
• 70x pipeline acceleration (compared with traditional cloud rendering)
• 26 months → 1 week rendering time

1. Limitless Scalability and Scene Complexity

Render Network uses a decentralized pool of high-VRAM GPUs, orchestrated via parallel processing. This gives even solo artists the same computational horsepower as a Tier-1 VFX house.

For SUBMERGE, this meant:

Breaking the VRAM Ceiling: SUBMERGE’s 95-megapixel assets were too heavy for standard local hardware to hold in memory. Render’s ability to tap into nodes with 24GB+ of VRAM ensured that 18K frames could be processed without crashing or downscaling. Scenes included high-density particle systems, volumetric lighting, and physics-based simulations that would crash local workstations.

A Simultaneous Pipeline: Render supported artists working simultaneously, rather than a staggered, serial workflow. While 12 different artist groups worked concurrently from across the globe over the 8-week window, they could all render high-resolution tests and final frames within a compressed timeline, often overlapping with one another, but without queuing.

Time Compression: By distributing these massive files across thousands of nodes, Render turned a process that would have taken weeks on a local workstation into one that took days or even hours, ensuring the team met an unmovable launch deadline.

2. Pipeline Efficiency through Differential Uploads

In a high-resolution 18K environment, file sizes are enormous. Typical cloud ingestion, which requires re-uploading an entire scene for every small change, would have been prohibitive given the two-month timeline. Render leverages differential uploading, a system that hashes scene data to identify exactly what has changed.

For SUBMERGE, differential uploading had a significant impact on iteration, since only the new or modified data needed to be synced with the network.

The 70x Acceleration Factor: This streamlined workflow accelerated scene preparation and ingestion by up to 70x compared to typical centralized cloud workflows. The SUBMERGE artists could iterate at their own speed, moving from a “submit and wait” culture to a “tweak and render” workflow that supports the constant process of creative refinement required for world-class quality.

3. Seamless Interoperability (Octane & ORBX)

To understand Render’s impact, it is essential to clarify the relationship between OTOY’s OctaneRender engine and the ORBX file format.

OctaneRender is the industry’s first and fastest unbiased, physically correct GPU render engine. OTOY does not license Octane for use on cloud render farms, and OctaneRender is available for distributed GPU rendering on Render Network. This means Render Network is an optimal solution for studios that require Octane’s photorealistic output at scale.

ORBX is an interchangeable “container” format designed to encapsulate every element of a 3D scene, including geometry, high-resolution textures, complex lighting, and materials, into a single, atomic file natively understood by Render Network. The ORBX file format facilitates hashing and thus enables differential uploading.

For SUBMERGE, this meant:

• Zero Setup Overhead: Because ORBX acts as a self-contained exported output, it removes the dependency on native Digital Content Creation (DCC) files. Artists could work in their preferred tools — such as Cinema4D or Houdini — and export directly to the network without configuring Docker containers or virtual machines. This allowed the 12 artist groups who worked on SUBMERGE to focus entirely on the immersive creative experience rather than technical infrastructure management.
• Eliminating Licensing Friction: Cloud farms require studios to set up their own licensing and provide credentials for every remote node. In contrast, Render’s ORBX-based workflow includes licensing entitlements, meaning the SUBMERGE artists could render distributed jobs without re-entering proof-of-purchase for every individual node.

Render Network vs. Centralized Solutions

Pipeline Overview: 12 Artist Groups, 5 Distinct Technical Bottlenecks

The exhibition features twelve unique pieces produced by a diverse group of individual artists and artistic pairings, ranging from Emmy winners to emerging 3D luminaries. They faced various technical challenges when scaling their work to an 18K environment.

1. AI-native pipeline scaling
2. Heavy physics + light simulations
3. Compressing “impossible” production timelines
4. Legacy IP upscaling
5. High-fidelity texture and color precision

1. AI-native pipeline scaling: Bridging the resolution gap between generative AI outputs and cinematic exhibition standards

William Selviz + Manuel Sainsily, a creative duo working at the intersection of immersive media and generative tools, created Protopica: Sin Agua No Hay Tiempo. Their core creative tool was OpenAI’s Sora, which introduced a major production constraint, as Sora outputs video at standard resolutions and cannot natively produce ultra-high-resolution frames for final exhibition.

To bridge this, the duo built a hybrid pipeline using Render Network to upscale, denoise, and re-render AI-generated assets at full production resolution. Distributed rendering enabled an AI-native workflow to move from creation to final large-format delivery without rebuilding the project in a separate pipeline.

“Render Network allows me to compete as an independent creator. In the future, this kind of IP will come from individuals, not studios.”

— William Selviz, SUBMERGE artist, quoted in PCMag

2. Heavy physics + light simulations: Overcoming VRAM ceilings and computationally heavy light-path calculations for complex, reflective 3D environments

This group dealt with immense computational loads, where high-density particle systems and physics-based lighting exceeded the memory of standard workstations.

FVCKRENDER is a Montreal-born self-taught artist whose work is defined by sharp, crystalline geometry and futuristic architecture. In his piece, Infinite Fields, the hurdle was the complexity of light-path calculations across countless sharp, reflective crystalline surfaces, which typically creates a bottleneck for centralized hardware.

David Ariew and Chelsea Evenstar faced a similar challenge. Known for their mastery of light and “cosmic” architectural environments, their piece — 1685: Immersive — was originally created as a “cosmic cathedral” collaboration with Grammy-winning artist Zedd for his 2025 Coachella set. For displaying at SUBMERGE, they utilized complex reflections and physics-based lighting that required massive VRAM to calculate.

Likewise, Josh Pierce’s digital art and motion designs focus on the intersection of nature, presence, and spiritual stillness. In his piece, Satori: The Infinite Now, the lush-looking landscapes utilized high-density scatter systems for foliage and volumetric light-beam simulations that exceeded the capacity of high-end workstations.

By using Render Network, this group had the computational headroom required to process heavy-duty simulations and industry-leading light calculations, without simplifying the creative vision or suffering system crashes.

“It feels like more of a partnership with the 3D software because it’s really based on how physics work. I throw some light in there, and then I get to see what comes out of that kind of mystical box.”

— David Ariew, SUBMERGE artist

“Render Network is an incredibly powerful tool for 3D artists to be able to generate these worlds on a really rich level that can’t be done any other way.”

— Josh Pierce, SUBMERGE artist

Compressing “impossible” production timelines: Reducing multi-year render forecasts for procedural and algorithmic work

For these artists, the main barrier was less about complexity than the timeline required to render their work locally.

MHXis a self-taught visual artist specializing in generative art and algorithmic growth. His contribution, LATTICE, is a complex display of procedural simulations. He estimates it would have taken 26 months to render at 18K on his local setup — a timeline that he compressed to one week by harnessing Render Network.

Amrit Pal Singh’s work has a very different aesthetic, but he faced a similarly impossible timeline. Singh is a Delhi-based 3D illustrator celebrated for blending digital craft with the tactile nostalgia of physical collectibles. His piece, Adventures of the Toy Maker, required rendering vast, playful worlds with soft lighting and high-density textures at a scale that was computationally prohibitive on his local workstation.

In both of these cases, Render Network acted as a “force multiplier,” compressing a 26-month forecast (MHX) into less than a week, and a multi-month estimate (Singh) into a three-day turnaround.

“It’s not just about speed; it’s about making the impossible actually possible for a solo artist.”

— MHX, SUBMERGE artist

“Seeing your work on this scale is mind-blowing for any artist. It’s almost like a superpower. On my computer, it would still take a few months to render the whole 3-minute animation. With Render Network, it took me three days.”

— Amrit Pal Singh, SUBMERGE artist

Legacy IP upscaling: Reimagining and expanding standard assets for an 18K, 270-degree panoramic canvas

These artists transformed existing high-quality work into immersive spatial experiences, bypassing the “render penalty” that usually prevents such scaling.

Maciej Kuciara and Emily Yang are Emmy award-winning creators who adapted their celebrated White Rabbit universe into a physical, spatial experience for SUBMERGE. The original version of White Rabbit, which won the 2025 Emmy for Outstanding Innovation in Emerging Media Programming, was authored for 4K on standard screens, but the ARTECHOUSE canvas required a leap to 18K for a 270-degree environment.

Woosung Kang (aka VJ WOOO) is an Emmy-nominated motion designer who transformed a decade of his legacy work into a piece for SUBMERGE titled Nebula Junkyard. It blends high-intensity scenes from multiple past projects, re-rendered for ARTECHOUSE’s 18K, 270-degree canvas.

Gavin Shapiro, known for his viral loops with billions of views, also reached into his archive, expanding his 2021 loop called Wingin It into a high-fidelity experience. The transition from a 4K screen to an 18K environment while preserving the crisp, satirical detail presented a severe hardware bottleneck.

By using Render Network, this group bypassed hardware limitations, allowing them to treat massive data sets as fluid creative playgrounds and hit deadlines that were otherwise unreachable.

“For most of my career, the scale of my imagination was limited by access to resources. SUBMERGE changes that equation… this show proves we can produce work that rivals, and even surpasses, what comes out of the biggest studios.”

— Maciej Kuciara, SUBMERGE artist

“It’s amazing that in Artechouse you can see the audience react to an immersive space with three side walls, even the floor. It’s a truly special experience.”

— Woosung Kang, SUBMERGE artist

“I wanted to take advantage of the emotional response from seeing a physical piece of performance art, and combine that with the strengths of digital tools, which let you do things you’d never be able to do otherwise.”

— Gavin Shapiro, SUBMERGE artist

High-Fidelity Texture & Color Precision: Maintaining visual integrity and seamless color transitions at a 95-megapixel scale

When work is projected at museum scale, subtle technical flaws like “banding” become glaring errors, presenting a specific technical challenge for artists relying on visual integrity for impact.

Blake Kathryn and Maalavidaa are a collaborative duo whose work explores “femme surrealism” and abstract color therapy. The River Remembers is a vibrant, pastel-hued dreamscape that relies on soft gradients and subtle transitions between hues, meaning it’s highly sensitive to compression and resolution limits. On a standard render farm, these smooth gradients often break, creating visible lines that shatter the immersive illusion.

Jess Wiseman is a 3D artist and creative technologist known for her ability to find the surreal within mundane environments. Her SUBMERGE piece, Cycle Reset, includes hyper-realistic experiences that rely on texture-first fidelity to recreate chrome sheens, fabric textures, and even the fluff of popcorn, which all demand ultra-high resolution to remain effective in a 270-degree immersive space.

For this group, Render Network provided “big studio” infrastructure to output high-bitrate files that maintained seamless color transitions and fine detail, ensuring the emotional “flow” and tactile realism were not lost.

“For the first SUBMERGE show, myself and a handful of artists rendered at half the full scale due to limitations at that time, which shows how far the technology has come in a year.”

— Blake Kathryn

“Normally, you have an idea, but then you also have the logistics of ‘Can my computer actually do it in time?’ Not having to worry about that opened pretty much any idea to be created.”

— Jess Wiseman, SUBMERGE artist

While these creative visions vary in aesthetic, they all share a common reliance on a specific set of technical breakthroughs enabled by Render Network.

What This Means for the Future of Immersive Art

The success of SUBMERGE signals a shift in the economics of digital creation. As the industry moves toward increasingly sophisticated spatial environments and higher resolutions, the accessibility of high-performance compute has become the most significant barrier.

By decentralizing the rendering process, Render Network has effectively democratized the tools for large-scale production, allowing independent artists and boutique studios to compete with Tier-1 studios. The future of immersive art lies in removing technical friction, where the leap from a 4K concept to an 18K museum installation is a seamless operational step rather than a prohibitive financial or time-based risk.

Looking toward the next iteration of digital experiences, the ability to scale compute power on demand will be a defining factor in which stories get told. Render Network is committed to providing that scalable infrastructure, ensuring that as display technology evolves, creators have the raw power needed to inhabit it.

To see how you or your studio’s production pipeline can be accelerated affordably, check out the Render Network at rendernetwork.com.

RenderCon 2026 saw 50 speakers and 23 sessions across two days

2 days. 2 stages. 23 sessions. 50 speakers.

RenderCon 2026 brought together artists, filmmakers, technologists, and builders working at the edge of media, AI, and decentralized compute.

Across two days in Hollywood, the conversation centered on how the future of storytelling is being shaped by content creation tools and trends, emerging AI workflows, and the growing need for scalable GPU infrastructure.

From keynote sessions to artist panels, RenderCon this year highlighted a growing interest in scalable, interactive, and iterative creative loops.

Day one opened with Jules Urbach delivering a keynote packed with observations and examples of real work products delivered through the latest version of OTOY’s Canvas product and forward-looking tech slated to run on Render Network in the near future.

The day continued with perspectives on broader trends and insights from a wide swath of technologists and leaders speaking on the event’s mainstage, including Richard Kerris of NVIDIA, Francesco Siddi of the Blender Foundation, Zheru Liu of Kling AI, and Daniel Berkovitz of LTX Studio. Check out the full program.

The talks showcased the thinking of creators-turned-panelists such as Fede Alvarez, director of Alien: Romulus, Alex Ross, long-time comic book artist for DC and Marvel, and four of the 16 artists who designed the most ambitious and largest-scale Render Network-support project to date, SUBMERGE: Beyond the Render.

Day two focused on more immersive conversations with creatives and builders in addition to both Dispersed and Render Network product updates, workshops, demos, and case studies. From Render Network and Dispersed product updates and demos, to workshops on unique VFX workflows and artists showcasing their latest projects, the audience took note of what their fellow creators had to share.

Key Themes from the Stage

From Rendering to Real-Time Creation. In the Future of Cinema panel, Richard Kerris (NVIDIA) and Fede Álvarez explored how workflows are evolving from waiting on renders to manipulating content in real time. This shift is redefining how stories are built, making narrative the driver, rather than software constraints.

AI as a Creative Loop, Not a Shortcut. Across multiple sessions, speakers emphasized that AI is most powerful when integrated into the creative process, not used as a replacement for it. Real-time video generation, simulation environments, and world-building tools are enabling faster iteration while still relying on human direction and taste.

The Importance of Craft. Despite rapid advances in automation, creators shared their perspective around the symbiotic relationship between tech and artistry. The physical and emotional process of making — whether on set, in 3D, or in immersive environments — remains central to meaningful work. Technology opens doors by facilitating workflows.

The Compute Bottleneck. In his talk on building “holodeck”-like experiences, Emad Mostaque underscored a recurring constraint: compute. As the cost of creating assets approaches zero, access to GPUs becomes the limiting factor.

During the Dispersed case studies session, five builders articulated the individual challenges they were solving for and their unique solution to each problem, powered by the decentralized network of GPUs on Dispersed.

Expanding the Language of Media. From neural rendering to Gaussian splats, world models, and agent-driven workflows, discussions throughout the event pointed to a future where tools become more adaptive.

Catch the 86-second highlights reel:

The RenderCon 2026 Immersive Portrait Gallery

Our team wanted to provide a fun, immersive experience that showcased a lot of the tech that was the topic of conversation throughout the two days. Attendees who chose to participate in the immersive experience had the chance to have their photo taken to be turned into various creative portraits that were displayed on a screen in the room.

Now, we’ve turned those images into a rotating gallery. Check it out.

Check out the panel recordings now available

Sessions are now available to watch on-demand. Full session recordings are releasing throughout the month.

Ecosystem metrics

The Render Network Foundation tracks various metrics on its network. Below is the aggregate view of the month’s activity, previous month’s activity, and month-over-month change for a few key metrics.

Key Render Network metrics

*A note on the foundation node rewards vs. prior month: The rendering node operated by the Render Network Foundation was connected, at the hardware level, for the full month, generating the typical monthly costs. However, the software wasn’t connecting properly and though it was eventually restarted, it did not run as expected for a portion of the month. Hence the node was unable to get assigned rendering tasks, earning fewer rewards than would have been expected.

Node Operator Rewards (in RENDER)

Looking for definitions of each of these terms? Check out our previous monthly reports.

Product updates

How Developers Are Building on Dispersed, From RenderCon 2026

Last month we expanded node recruiting and onboarding to include Canada-based node operators with more regions rolling out in the coming weeks.

GPUs that meet the specifications for the network are encouraged to apply as we anticipate growth in usage. Interested operators can apply here: https://waitlist.renderfoundation.com/

At RenderCon, multiple users showcased what they’re building on Dispersed.

Omniscient Inc: A decentralized AI memory layer to Preserve User Privacy and Sovereignty Across AI Tools

Hannah Barris, CEO of Omniscient Inc. reminded the audience of the challenges with privacy — specifically the lack thereof — with current AI chat products. To address it, she developed Omniscient, a decentralized AI memory layer that transforms stateless AI tools into persistent, personalized systems by aggregating and structuring user-owned data into a continuously evolving context engine.

Built on composable infrastructure (e.g., Manifest Network and Dispersed), it leverages decentralized compute networks to enable portable, containerized workloads across providers, ensuring data sovereignty, privacy, and resilience without vendor lock-in.

As model capabilities converge, Omniscient positions context ownership as the key competitive advantage. The goal is to allow users to retain control of their data while powering more accurate, context-aware AI experiences across any model or platform.

Interested in testing it out*? Omniscient has opened their waitlist: https://omniscient.site

*Not an endorsement from the Render Network Foundation.

OrbitRisk: Predictive Satellite Risk Intelligence

Avia Kraft, CEO of Corpus Park, walked the audience through OrbitRisk, a real-time analytics platform that transforms complex orbital, environmental, and cybersecurity data into actionable risk intelligence for satellite operators and insurers.

OrbitalRisk combines live inputs like collision probability, space weather, and encryption vulnerabilities with orbital mechanics modeling. The output is dynamic risk profiles and forward-looking projections that surface hidden patterns, clusters, and emerging threats.

The platform is designed for interactive visualizations and customizable risk parameters that allow users to assess exposures across fleets, simulate future scenarios, and make informed operational and insurance decisions. The platform’s ability to ingest user-provided data and uncover novel, non-obvious risks makes it a powerful tool for proactively managing assets in an increasingly congested and volatile space environment.

Sarson Funds and Manifest Network: On-Demand GPU Infrastructure for AI Agents

Jon Gutwillig represented Manifest Network, in partnership with Sarson Funds, demonstrating a decentralized infrastructure model where AI applications dynamically access distributed GPU resources to power real-time, multi-model workflows.

Applications like Agent1 (an encrypted, multi-model AI assistant) and Suma (a crypto portfolio analysis tool) orchestrate multiple GPU jobs per query, ranging from embeddings to inference. The goal is to select the most cost-efficient hardware for each task across networks. This architecture enables scalable, on-demand compute without idle overhead, allowing AI agents to “hire” GPUs programmatically as needed. The result is a flexible, privacy-preserving, and economically efficient system that turns AI from a static service into an active consumer of decentralized compute infrastructure.

Render Network Updates: Adding Google Drive Cloud Storage and Insydium Fused Now in Beta

Cloud Storage to Expand to Google Drive Soon

Cloud storage upload, already available for Dropbox will be available for Google Drive in May! This feature allows Render Network users to set up a watch folder to automatically upload scenes to the network. Try it out.

Cinema 4D Fused Packages in Beta on Render Network

Cinema 4D users might be interested in the following product news coming out of RenderCon 2026: Render Network is adding support for the Insydium Fused package for Cinema 4D, including X-Particles and other Fused packages. This feature is currently available for beta testing. Interested in trying it out? Reach out to us across our socials including Discord, X, or within the Webapp chat support feature.

Governance Updates

RNP-023 Passes the Final Vote, Bringing Salad Network into the Render Network Ecosystem for Node Rewards and Payments

RNP-023 was proposed in March and passed the final voting round in April, enabling Salad Technologies to use RENDER as its exclusive payments infrastructure for node operators.

The existing network has 60,000 active GPUs, serving real-world compute use cases since 2018. The team at Salad sought to integrate an existing onchain payments layer that made sense for their operations, ultimately choosing Render Network to fill this need. This proposal is estimated to contribute $2.3M towards burns, and $2.1M towards RENDER-based node operator rewards in its first year after full integration.

In the News

Render Network on AllInCrypto: Scaling Compute for the Next Era of AI and Media

This month, Trevor Harris-Jones, Board Member of the Render Network Foundation, joined the All In Crypto podcast to discuss the origins of the network, its evolution, and the growing role of decentralized GPU infrastructure.

The conversation begins with the early challenge that led to Render Network’s creation: a large-scale content production project that would have taken months — even while utilizing major centralized cloud resources. That bottleneck ultimately sparked the idea of distributing rendering workloads across a global network of GPUs.

Key themes from the discussion to listen for:

• Why centralized compute doesn’t always scale for creative demand
• The rise of decentralized GPU networks
• Expanding beyond rendering into general compute
• Why demand for compute will continue to grow

The full episode explores how Render Network fits into a rapidly evolving landscape where compute is becoming one of the most critical resources in both AI and digital content creation.

Artist Spotlight: SUBMERGE — Beyond the Render

This month’s spotlight highlights the artists behind SUBMERGE: Beyond the Render, the immersive exhibition at ARTECHOUSE NYC, several of whom joined us on stage at RenderCon 2026.

Featuring Blake Kathryn, David Ariew, Woo-Sung Kang, and Joshua Pierce, the panel offered a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to create art for an 18K, 270-degree environment.

A few standout insights:

Scaling creative ambition

David Ariew shared that one piece — originally created at 7K — was adapted to 18K for SUBMERGE. Rendering on a personal setup would have taken an estimated two years, underscoring the role of distributed GPU rendering in making these works feasible.

Designing across formats

Woo-Sung Kang described how his project evolved across multiple formats. He talked about going from a traditional stage setup to a fully immersive installation, and later into a VR experience. Each iteration required new technical and creative considerations along the way.

Building beyond what’s visible

Blake Kathryn approached her piece as a full 360-degree world, even though only 270 degrees are displayed in the physical space — prioritizing artistic intent over technical constraints.

Pushing technical limits

Joshua Pierce worked with complex volumetric data (VDBs) at 18K resolution, facing render times of several minutes per frame. With Render Network, the project was completed ahead of schedule without compromising quality.

More broadly, the panel reinforced the idea that, as digital and physical experiences continue to converge, immersive art will play an increasingly important role. Scalable compute infrastructure will be essential to bringing those experiences to life.

Thanks for reading, see you next month!

RenderCon 2026 full lineup and program is live!

The preeminent conference for artists, studios, AI builders, and compute leaders is days away.

The full speaker lineup is top tier. Check out the program for the two-day event.

On April 16–17 at Nya Studios in Hollywood, artists, studios, AI builders, and compute leaders will come together for two days of bleeding edge talks and workshops exploring the future of rendering, AI, and decentralized infrastructure.April 16–17, 2026 · Hollywood, California.

Get tickets now.

Get 50% off tickets with code: COUNTDOWNTORC.

Ecosystem metrics

The Render Network Foundation tracks various metrics on its network. Below is the aggregate view of the month’s activity, previous month’s activity, and month-over-month change for a few key metrics.

Looking for definitions of each of these terms? Check out our previous monthly reports.

Product updates

Dispersed Sees Week-on-Week Usage Growth in March

March brought continued momentum for Dispersed, the distributed GPU network designed for AI workloads and general compute jobs.

March saw multiple week-over-week usage increases reflecting growing interest in distributed, cost-efficient GPU infrastructure for emerging inference and compute-heavy use cases.

At the same time, Dispersed is ramping up recruitment of node operators to support growing demand and expand available capacity across the network.

Node Operator Incentives

Qualified node operators currently receive 6 RENDER weekly, in addition to any RENDER earned from completed compute jobs. Details on rewards per GPU type can be found here.

This model is designed to reward both availability and active participation, while helping scale the supply side of the network as demand for decentralized compute continues to grow.

Does your hardware qualify?

Apply here:

waitlist.renderfoundation.com

Governance Updates

RNP-023 Proposes Salad Network Integrating With the Render Network for Node Rewards and Payments

A new governance proposal was introduced in March: RNP-023 proposes integrating Salad into the Render Network as a subnet.

The integration would bring Salad’s real-world demand and active GPU network onto Render Network. Specifically it seeks to move node rewards onchain and enable RENDER-based payment as an option for customers.

Salad estimates $4.3M in revenue in the first year of integration. Rewards to node operators resulting from that activity would, under this initiative, now be issued in RENDER. Additionally, the Salad team plans to implement payment in RENDER as an option for customers.

Why It Matters

Salad’s integration of Render Network as their onchain payments layer reflects growing alignment between decentralized payment infrastructure and real-world compute marketplaces. Per the Salad team, the integration would support a transition of distributed computing rewards and payment options onchain using RENDER while preserving existing customer workflows across its core products.

For the Render Network ecosystem, the proposal is an opportunity to grow both demand-side utility and sustained token burns, while broadening the network’s role in powering practical compute use cases.

In the News

Render Network Featured in The Verge on OpenAI’s Decision to Shut Down Video Generation Tool Sora

Render Network Foundation board member Trevor Harries-Jones was quoted in The Verge in a March 28th article following OpenAI’s decision to shut down Sora, commenting on the speed of innovation and fierce competition shaping the AI video market. His remarks reflected a broader shift in the space: as model quality improves across the board, creators are increasingly evaluating tools based on practical output, reliability, and workflow fit, not just launch hype.

Why OpenAI killed Sora

Render Network on the BlockHash podcast: Rendering, AI, and the Next Phase of Distributed Compute

Trevor Harries-Jones also joined the BlockHash podcast in March to discuss the evolution of the Render Network from distributed rendering for motion graphics and VFX into a broader decentralized GPU network supporting both creative and AI workloads.

The conversation covered hybrid AI plus rendering workflows, the growing importance of open creative tools like Blender, and how distributed consumer GPUs will play an increasing role in inference, creator tooling, and future world model workloads.

Catch it on any of the following podcast platforms:

Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/3dpapyjx

Apple Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/msbxe4cw

Amazon Music: https://tinyurl.com/472sye4x

YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/477k8y5t

Salad’s distributed computing network, now operating across 180+ countries, settles node rewards and customer payments onchain, giving node operators greater flexibility in how they receive and redeem earnings as centralized GPU costs continue to rise.

Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands — April 7, 2026 — The Render Network Foundation, the governance entity behind the decentralized GPU computing network Render Network, announced today that Salad, a distributed cloud computing company, has selected Render Network as its exclusive onchain payments layer. The integration moves Salad network payments and node-operator rewards—estimated at more than $2.3M/year—onchain using RENDER tokens, creating a transparent, blockchain-based mechanism for distributing rewards and processing payments across one of the world’s largest distributed GPU networks.

The announcement comes at a critical moment for AI infrastructure. In January, AWS quietly raised the price of its H200 GPU instances by more than 15% with no advance notice, widening the cost gap for large-scale AI workloads and forcing developers and enterprises to explore alternatives. At the scale AI now demands, traditional cloud pricing and limited GPU availability are forcing developers and enterprises to rethink how infrastructure costs are managed and how operators are compensated.

Salad operates across 180+ countries with 60,000 active GPUs, powering AI inference, video rendering, scientific research, and other high-performance computing workloads. By introducing RENDER-based payments for node operators (known as “Chefs”), the integration expands how participants in the network are compensated, while also enabling customers to pay in RENDER alongside existing billing options.

“Shifting our payments and rewards onchain gives our Chefs more control over how they receive and use their earnings,” said Bob Miles, Salad’s Founder & CEO. “At a time when cloud costs are rising and GPU availability is constrained, this integration helps us keep compute accessible and scalable for the workloads ahead.”

For developers and enterprises, the integration adds a flexible payment layer to Salad’s existing large-scale compute offerings across AI, rendering, and research workloads. For node operators, it introduces the ability to withdraw onchain rewards to self-custodied wallets or redeem them through Salad’s storefront.

“By enabling Salad’s network to handle payments and rewards onchain, we’re opening a scalable path for real-world infrastructure to incorporate blockchain without overhauling their business,” said Tristan Relly, Head of Operations, Render Network Foundation. “This is how traditional distributed networks position to meet the speed and scale of the emerging AI economy.”

By moving node rewards and customer payments onchain, Salad introduces a model where distributed compute operators are paid faster, with more flexibility, and in a way that scales with the AI economy. This marks a step toward integrating blockchain-native finance directly into real-world infrastructure.

To learn more, visit https://blog.salad.com/salad-joins-render-network/.

About Salad

Salad operates globally distributed cloud infrastructure supporting a wide range of customers from AI Startups to Fortune 500 Enterprise organisations. Both datacenters and individuals can share latent computational resources with Salad, turning the world’s idle hardware into meaningful rewards. With thousands of existing customers running production workloads across tens of thousands of machines, Salad powers cutting-edge compute applications for far less than hyperscale providers.

About Render Network Foundation

The Render Network Foundation is the governance organization for the world’s leading decentralized compute network, the Render Network. The network connects node operators looking to monetize their idle GPU compute power with artists looking to scale intensive 3D-rendering work and with machine learning developers looking to train and tune AI models.

Refik Anadol. Alex Ross. Francesco Siddi. Emad Mostaque.

These are just a few of our announced RenderCon 2026 speakers.

April 16–17, 2026 · Hollywood, California

Get tickets.

RenderCon 2026 is focused on the future of art, media, and technology, and where the most meaningful work needs to happen next.

Confirmed speakers include:

• Refik Anadol, Founder, DATALAND, the world’s first Museum of AI Arts
• Alex Ross, DC Comics and Marvel comic book artist
• Francesco Siddi, CEO and Chairman, Blender Foundation
• Emad Mostaque, CEO and Founder, Intelligent Internet

And more.

Learn more at rendercon2026.com.

Watch the 2025 RenderCon recap reel:

Ecosystem metrics

The Render Network Foundation tracks various metrics on its network. Below is the aggregate view of the month’s activity, previous month’s activity, and month-over-month change for a few key metrics.

Looking for definitions of each of these terms? Check out our previous monthly reports.

Product updates: Dispersed Product Updates and Use Cases

Dispersed, the distributed GPU network by Render Network designed for general compute and AI workloads, has seen some UI updates and uptick of usage in the past month.

Image and video generation recipes (think of them as preset templates for LLMs targeting specific use cases) have been added to the interface for convenience. Documentation for Dispersed has also been updated and will continue to be updated as new features and functionality are added.

Dispersed for AI-Powered Workflows for Art

Last month we highlighted Bitmap, a project by artist MHX, a long-time user of the Render Network whose art piece, Lattice, is featured in SUBMERGE: Beyond the Render. He launched the Bitmap project back in January, powered by Dispersed and the Render Network.

MHX has graciously shared how he built Bitmap and encourages other creators to build their own generative workflow projects. So much so that he shared the Bitmap workflow publicly.

We’re working on a full case study of the Bitmap project and will publish it soon.

Dispersed for Document Parsing

Another use case we’ve seen on Dispersed is the use of the network to power real-world document parsing and text analysis workloads.

A document-parsing job run on the network can process multiple file types — including CSV, JSON, XML, PDF, plain text, and images. This particular application automatically detects the format and applies the appropriate parsing method. This enables structured extraction and analysis across a wide range of documents commonly used in data pipelines.

Importantly, the entire workflow runs 100% on Dispersed, with no reliance on external AI APIs. Model inference is executed on decentralized GPU nodes using vLLM, demonstrating the network’s ability to support real AI workloads end-to-end.

The system connects directly to the live Dispersed API with secure HMAC-SHA256 request signing, ensuring every compute job is authenticated and verifiable. GPU inference nodes can be deployed directly from the browser in under two minutes, and workloads run on real network hardware at approximately $0.69 per GPU hour.

This use case highlights how Dispersed can support practical AI tasks such as document parsing and data extraction, while showcasing the network’s fast deployment, secure API architecture, and decentralized compute infrastructure.

We’re also supporting a builder who’s taking this concept to scale, specifically focused on analyzing scientific research across hundreds of academic papers. The goal is to create a public, open assessment of scientific evidence across fields such as behavioral science, public policy, and medicine.

More details on this project and its use of Dispersed are coming soon.

Artist spotlight: Kyle Gordon

This month we sat down with Kyle Gordon, an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and experiential designer based in San Francisco. Over the past 15 years, Kyle has built large-scale immersive installations and spatial environments for globally recognized brands and festivals including HP, Coachella, and #CarbonDrop.

In the interview, Kyle walks us through his creative process — from organic pattern systems and emotional storytelling to the full pipeline of concept, 3D modelling, and physical execution. We explore how scalable GPU rendering via Render Network supports the resolution demands and tight deadlines that come with festival and architectural-scale work, and where he sees immersive design heading as AI and decentralized compute become part of the creative toolkit.

Watch the interview:

Announcements

The Render Network Team attended RENDR Festival in Belfast, Feb 12–13
RENDR Festival is a premier event hosted in Belfast, for inspiring creatives, exploring the space between creativity and technology across film, gaming, animation, and immersive experiences.

The 2026 event took place on 12–13 February and featured talent behind global hits including The Last of US, KPop Demon Hunters, and Alien Romulus.

The Render Network team connected with creatives and speakers from leading global entertainment companies, award winning production studios surrounded by the backdrop of Belfast, a significant hub for global screen production.

As we look back at the Render Network ecosystem in 2025, we’re sharing a comprehensive overview of emissions, expenditures, and network usage across both Network operations and Foundation operations, along with key milestones that shaped the year.

In our midyear update, we revisited how the burn-mint equilibrium (BME) model works and addressed two recurring questions:

• What is the Foundation doing with emissions allocated to operations?
• Why are emissions front-loaded in the early years?

Those overviews remain relevant and can be found in our July monthly report. In this annual update, we build on that with a full-year view and context around how 2025 marked a pivotal year in the network’s evolution. With 2025 emissions totaling 5,637,150 RENDER, split evenly between Network operations and Foundation operations, outflows are summarized in a table, followed by contextual explainers.

We’ve also included net cumulative token balances through the end of 2025, for both Network operations at 4,636,925 RENDER and Foundation operations at 2,019,647 RENDER.

From immersive, large-scale artistic production to the launch of dedicated AI compute infrastructure called Dispersed, 2025 was foundational for what’s to come for Render Network.

Emissions Overview: January 1 — December 31, 2025

All figures below are denominated in RENDER unless otherwise noted.

Network Operations

Line items explained for 2025:

Accounting note: As noted at mid-year, small variances versus on-chain figures may occur due to accrual vs. cash accounting, with reconciliation in subsequent periods.

Takeaway:
Network operations in 2025 prioritized creator grants and node incentives while maintaining a surplus for future RNP initiatives.

Foundation Operations

Line items explained for 2025:

What “Provision of Services” covered in 2025:

• Protocol and software development
• Infrastructure maintenance
• Communications
• Marketing and growth initiatives (E.g. RenderCon, Breakpoint headline sponsorship, SUBMERGE)
• Business development and partnerships
• Grants administration
• Operations
• Risk and compliance
• Staff compensation
• Software and operating expenses

Takeaway:

Foundation operations expanded in 2025 to support both the core rendering network and new AI compute infrastructure via Dispersed.

As the network continues to grow, net surplus resources are deployed for sustained development and ecosystem growth.

Network Usage

Line items explained for 2025:

Takeaway:

Demand for decentralized GPU rendering continued to grow in 2025, reinforcing real-world utility of the network.

*Network operations are provided in USDC as well as RENDER to account for RENDER / USDC exchange fluctuations. This more closely reflects growth.

2025 Milestones: Scaling Creative & AI Compute

To contextualize the numbers, it’s worth recapping how 2025 marked a defining year for the Render Network’s capabilities and direction.

Submerge at ARTECHOUSE NYC

The Render Network Foundation sponsored SUBMERGE: Beyond the Render, an immersive exhibition held at ARTECHOUSE in New York City. This took place in two parts throughout 2025: an experimental launch in January and a more fully developed program in September.

SUBMERGE: Beyond the Render was the largest use of the Render Network across a single coordinated project to date:

• 16 artists
• 12 immersive 3D works
• Fully rendered on the Render Network’s distributed GPUs

This use of the network to power a multi-artist, large-scale immersive exhibition of this complexity showcased what the network has been capable of for some time, at commercial scale. The project demonstrated that decentralized GPU infrastructure can reliably support:

• Studio-grade commercial production
• Large-format immersive installations
• Independent artist experimentation
• Cross-disciplinary creative collaboration

SUBMERGE: Beyond the Render served as proof that decentralized compute is not just viable — it is production-ready at scale. Coverage across national and local New York city media, including PCMag, brought the Render Network to new audiences.

Launch of the Dispersed Network

2025 also marked the launch of Dispersed, a dedicated compute subnet by the people beyond the Render Network, designed to support emerging AI workloads.

Built with more than five years of operational experience running a distributed GPU rendering network, Dispersed represents the next phase of infrastructure evolution: purpose-built compute capacity for AI-enabled and general compute workflows.

While still in its early stages, initial integrations and testing in 2025 laid the groundwork for expanded case studies in 2026, including creative-AI convergence projects such as The Bitmap by artist MHX, which demonstrates how decentralized GPU infrastructure can support generative image and video pipelines.

The launch of Dispersed signals a long-term strategic direction: positioning decentralized GPU infrastructure at the intersection of creativity and AI. It’s still early days for both Dispersed and the AI industry; the next few years are expected to generate new opportunities and growth for both.

AI-Enabled Product Development

In parallel, ecosystem partners including OTOY continued expanding AI-focused tools such as OTOY Studio and Canvas, early indicators of how rendering and generative AI workflows may increasingly converge.

These early experiments in 2025 are setting the stage for:

• AI-assisted 3D content creation
• Generative image and video pipelines
• Hybrid rendering + AI compute workloads

We believe this convergence will drive sustained demand across both the core rendering network and the Dispersed network in 2026 and beyond.

Looking Ahead

2025 was a year of experimentation, product expansion, continued growth in network usage, and foundational infrastructure expansion. It was also a year where teams were brought on to build internal processes and discipline to manage growth into the future in a responsible, performance-based manner.

In order to sustainably and consistently deliver narratives of emerging models of decentralization, internal discipline is key to ensuring marketing and growth initiatives are iterated and optimized.

Key themes from 2025 that carry over into 2026:

• Thoughtful, measured spending of front-loaded emissions
• Continued surplus available for reinvestment for long-term, category-building initiatives
• Sustained network demand despite macro volatility
• Demonstrated capability at immersive, large-scale production
• Entry into dedicated AI compute infrastructure

As AI application development accelerates globally, demand for GPU compute is expected to grow for years to come. Specifically in 2026, we hypothesize the convergence of AI and traditional media will play an increasingly important role in compute access. We expect to be able to support this via both the Render Network and Dispersed.

By continuing to invest in decentralized infrastructure — both for rendering and AI workloads — the Render Network is positioning itself to compete in a rapidly evolving compute landscape in 2026 and beyond.

We will continue to share transparent updates as growth programs mature and as new initiatives move from experimentation to production scale.

Onward into 2026.

At RenderCon 2025, three of the Render Network’s earliest users sat down to talk craft and scale. Director and animator Nick DenBoer, known as Smearballs, has pushed Octane and Render on everything from his Deadmau5 video Pomegranate to other inventive personal shorts. Filmmaker and remix artist Davy Force brought Render into features with the opening sequence for Rodney Ascher’s A Glitch in the Matrix, and continues to blend live action, 3D, and TV satire. Motion designer David Brodeur, known as Brilly, turned experiments into spectacle, from collaborations with Scott Storch to Coca-Cola’s takeover of the Las Vegas Sphere. The conversation was moderated by Phil Gara fromof the OTOY, a key Render Network ecosystem partner.

From first Renders to full production

The session opened with a highlight reel of the artists’ milestone projects: DenBoer’s Pomegranate music video for Deadmau5, Force’s visuals for Rodney Ascher’s A Glitch in the Matrix, and Brodeur’s Coca-Cola animation wrapping the Las Vegas Sphere. Together, they marked the Render Network’s shift from proof of concept to production-ready tool.

For DenBoer, Render unlocked professional polish without a studio pipeline. “Yeah, I use Octane pretty much every day,” he said, noting how the network lets him render alternate angles and “frivolous extra shots” that enrich the edit. Force took Render into feature filmmaking, while Brodeur bridged personal experimentation with commercial spectacle. Each artist described Render not as a backup solution but as part of daily creative rhythm — a distributed extension of their own workstation.

Weird work that leads the way

For these artists, weirdness is not an accident, it’s a method. Each built a career by following personal experiments that felt too strange or impractical for client work, only to find that those projects defined their style later.

Nick DenBoer went from running a construction company to remixing odd infomercials, to eventually creating 3D music videos and commercials, keeping Smearballs as his sandbox for “weird projects for fun.” Davy Force, who first picked up 3D tools in 1988, said Octane gave him “a whole new, rebirth of excitement about 3D,” reigniting his love of playful, surreal imagery that commercial jobs rarely allow.

“Clients would be like, you know, that weird blobby, gross thing that you just did this morning,” Brodeur summarized, “and then ask for something only tangentially related.”

In other words, clients may not want the experimental piece itself, but they hire the creative vision behind it.

Across the panel, the lesson was consistent: personal work that feels weird at first often becomes the source of the most original commercial ideas.

Speed vs. quality

When computing power multiplies, ambition follows. DenBoer joked that even with Render, “you still end up pushing scenes until render time fills the schedule.” He considered moving to real-time engines but stayed with Octane because, as he put it, “that extra five or ten percent of quality is worth so much to me.”

Brodeur echoed that mindset, describing how the Render Network lets artists deliver more without compromising craft. Distributed GPUs do not just shorten deadlines; they make experimentation possible. “I’ll throw extra camera runs or alternate takes,” DenBoer said. “It’s just rendering without me doing any compute power.” For independent creators, that flexibility turns technical access into creative range.

AI as an assistant, not an author

When the discussion turned to generative AI, the tone shifted from excitement to caution. Brodeur explained how he uses AI to upscale renders or interpolate motion “to avoid wasting time on renders that don’t change the creative.” Force embraced AI for cutting matte work and depth maps, admitting, “I never saw it coming.” Both praised AI for removing the tedious parts of production, not for inventing ideas.

DenBoer noted how some agencies misuse the tools: “Like here’s a difficult idea we made with Midjourney. Now do it for months and make it a reality. It’s just totally backwards.” For these artists, AI belongs in the utility layer, clearing repetitive tasks so human taste can stay at the center. The consensus was simple: use AI to reclaim time, not to replace intention, nor imagination.

Beyond JPEGs and toward human craft

Looking back, the artists saw the NFT boom as both absurd and transformative. “When something feels like it’s too good to be true, it probably is,” DenBoer said, but he also credited that moment with elevating digital art into the fine art conversation. Brodeur added that the flood of AI imagery has made simple JPEGs feel thin. The future, he argued, lies in “richer objects” such as scene graphs and volumetric files that can be re-rendered, reframed, or relit across new displays.

Their current projects point toward deeper immersion. DenBoer is experimenting with Gaussian splats inside Octane to merge photogrammetry and 3D scenes. Force is co-developing new live-action hybrids with DenBoer, while Brodeur builds physical installations that pair with his digital work. As Brodeur put it during the Q&A, “the pendulum always swings,” and after AI’s surge, audiences will crave human tactility again.

Technology will keep compounding — more nodes, faster networks — but as this panel made clear, progress only matters when it frees time for judgment and story. As Force closed, “Long live Octane.”

RenderCon 2026: Solving the last-mile problem of AI in real creative production.

RenderCon is back. 48-hour flash sale! Get your free tickets now.

April 16–17, 2026 · Hollywood, CA

Last year we started RenderCon to explore what’s possible with AI and creative compute. This year we continue on that path.

RenderCon 2026 is focused on the last mile of AI in media production — the gap between experiments and real, production-ready workflows. It’s where issues like control, consistency, and scale still break down, and where the most meaningful work needs to happen next.

Across two days, we’ll bring together artists, studios, developers, and technologists who are actively shipping work today. Expect practical conversations, real workflows, and fewer hypotheticals. This is about what’s usable now, what’s coming next, and how teams are actually building at the edge of rendering, AI, and media production.

The future of creative AI is being decided by creators in real, production-ready work.

From Feb 11 to 13th, a limited number of free passes are available on a first come, first serve basis.

Starting Friday, February 13th, Community Passes are available for $99. Price goes up to $149 on March 1st. As a Render Network community member, we invite you to register by Feb 28th before prices go up.

Learn more at https://www.rendercon.ai/2026

Get tickets at https://luma.com/rendercon2026

Watch the 2025 RenderCon recap reel:

Ecosystem metrics

The Render Network Foundation tracks various metrics on its network. Below is the aggregate view of the month’s activity, previous month’s activity, and month-over-month change for a few key metrics. Much of this information is found at stats.renderfoundation.com.

Key Render Network metrics

Looking for definitions of each of these terms? Check out our previous monthly reports.

Governance/Product updates

Dispersed powers the AI-enabled autonomous flows behind MHX’s BITMAP Project

The team behind Dispersed (the compute subnet by the Render Network) has been working on product, business, and marketing initiatives to bring the network to life.

One of the users of Dispersed is the artist known as MHX. You may know this veteran 3D generalist and motion designer for his focus on procedural, data-driven art, including his work, Lattice, which is part of the ongoing SUBMERGE show at the ARTECHOUSE immersive art space in New York City.

On January 1st, 2026, artist MHX launched his latest project, the BITMAP Project, a generative 3D art machine that transforms a single Bitcoin block each day into a 3D data sculpture. By selecting just one block from the previous day, the system works with thousands of transactions to create a new, time-anchored artwork every 24 hours. It does so without dealing with the scale and noise of the full blockchain.

The goal is to run autonomously and reliably over a year. To that end, BITMAP is built on the decentralized compute network, called Dispersed, which acts as the compute layer. BITMAP then prepares and simulates each scene across distributed nodes before sending it to the Render Network for 4K video output. The result is a fully automated, decentralized pipeline that creates, renders, and publishes a new artwork daily without manual intervention.

On his local computer, it would take MHX 35 hours of compute. By using Dispersed plus the Render Network for rendering, it takes 15 minutes, making this project feasible and able to run smoothly every 24 hours.

Look out for more details about this case study soon.

Artist spotlight: Josh Pierce

In our first Creative Foundations Instagram Live of the year, we caught up with Josh Pierce to talk through Satori: The Infinite Now, his immersive digital artwork created for ARTECHOUSE.

Josh is a visual artist and art director whose work blends surreal, natural environments with abstract energy forms, designed to draw viewers into a quiet, contemplative state. His practice is heavily influenced by mindfulness and spiritual presence, with a focus on stillness, awe, and the emotional weight of the present moment.

We walked through the project from brief to final delivery, keeping it real about the pressures that come with commissioned work — tight timelines, high expectations, and ambitious visuals. Josh shared how technically complex moments, especially dense atmospheric fog and caustic lighting, would have been extremely limiting to explore using local rendering alone.

By moving rendering onto the Render Network, he was able to iterate faster, explore subtle variations, and stay focused on creative intent rather than waiting on hardware. It unlocked more freedom in the process and gave him the confidence to push the work further without friction.

The Render Network on X (formerly Twitter): "One takeaway from our recent chat with @j_pierceart: artists don't need massive rigs or expensive GPUs anymore. A laptop + Render Network = a render farm or supercomputer at your fingertips.Travel the world and keep shipping work, without a giant desk rig or expensive... pic.twitter.com/bVLWG5dIXo / X"

One takeaway from our recent chat with @j_pierceart: artists don't need massive rigs or expensive GPUs anymore. A laptop + Render Network = a render farm or supercomputer at your fingertips.Travel the world and keep shipping work, without a giant desk rig or expensive... pic.twitter.com/bVLWG5dIXo

We wrapped with a broader conversation around creative growth, presence, and how having the right infrastructure in place can quietly change what artists feel comfortable attempting.

Catch up with the convo now over on our Instagram!

In the News

CCN — From Cloud to Crowd: How Render Network Scales AI and Rendering With Decentralized GPUs

CCN’s Dr. Lorena Nessi and Trevor Harries-Jones, Render Network Foundation board member. They talk about:

• How the Render Network has helped scale digital creativity and art as tech advances.
• Why, despite AI already unlocking a lot of opportunity, there’s still a long runway ahead.
• The biggest opportunities, such as inference, don’t need the latest and greatest hardware.
• How blockchain’s many premises (like smart contracts, no intermediaries, micropayments at scale) align perfectly for AI and creativity working hand in hand.

Read the article here.

Or watch the full interview on YouTube:

TheStreet Roundtable — Render Network director says DePIN could ease AI bottlenecks

Trevor Harries-Jones, board member at the Render Network Foundation, shared a perspective on how decentralized GPU networks don’t need to replace centralized systems. They can, instead, take on other AI workloads that are currently bottlenecked in traditional incumbents. That includes inference, which makes up 80% of GPU work.

https://www.thestreet.com/crypto/innovation/render-network-director-says-depin-could-ease-ai-bottlenecks

DigiTimes Asia — Render Network predicts fully brand-owned AI experiences and GPU-powered creation surge in 2026

The Render Network Foundation shared a few predictions for 2026 and beyond around the future of AI, rendering, and creativity. Foundation board director Trevor Harries-Jones’ prediction was quoted in the article: “The AI systems will power the entire experience, giving brands full control over their digital presence,” he said. The article covered the concept that brands are predicted to want to shift towards owning their own AI encounters in 2026. The idea, as explained in the article, is that AI systems would autonomously embody a company’s style and identity across the customer journey. From interactive media to support and service and more, brands would gain round-the-clock oversight and input into how AI drives their brand equity.

For small or medium size brands, building fully functional, autonomous AI systems will be prohibitively costly and technically challenging. However, the IP and/or AI models can remain in control of the brands while the underlying compute can be outsourced. That’s where a distributed network like that facilitated by Dispersed, the AI compute-focused network from the Render Network, can reduce risk for brands.

As for creators and studios, the article went on to further explain the prediction that consumer GPUs will be able to run advanced AI “world models” which will turn everyday PCs and laptops into high performance AI machines.

Why is that exciting? If creators can use them for complex models in real time, Trevor Harries-Jones was quoted as saying, “Suddenly, the same GPUs that power games can generate interactive worlds, smart simulations, and next-level AI experiences directly in the hands of those who use them.”

https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260114VL205/2026-gpu.html

Announcements

ICYMI: The Render Network merchandise store is officially open for business

If you didn’t catch our announcement last month, we want to remind you that we’ve launched an official merchandise store where you can pick up anything from t-shirts to hoodies, hats, and even mugs with designs created by artists who use the Render Network.

What’s Coming Up

The Render Network team at Rendr Festival in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Feb 12–13

The Render Network team will be at the inaugural Rendr Festival as a sponsor. The two-day event promises to include some great, behind-the-scenes insights from creators of some of the most iconic content including KPOP Demon Hunters, Stranger Things, Fallout, The Last of Us, and Claynosaurz. If you’re in the area, stop by and say hi to our team!

SUBMERGE: Beyond the Render has been extended through March

The SUMBERGE: Beyond the Render exhibit has been extended to March of 2026.

If you haven’t already and are near New York City in the next couple of months, check it out and experience one of the most immersive, large-scale compilations of digital art rendered at 18K, all done on the Render Network’s decentralized GPUs.