Financing of 30 million dollars, a quick overview of the new rising star in Solana's AI computing ecosystem: io.net

撰文：1912212.eth， Foresight News

The AI wave is sweeping the globe, but the surge in computational demand has led to a shortage of GPU supply. Meanwhile, solutions in Crypto and AI are beginning to make significant waves, with projects like Akash Network and Ritual performing exceptionally well. Just yesterday, a new entrant, io.net, completed a $30 million Series A funding round, led by Hack VC, with participation from Foresight Ventures, Multicoin Capital, Delphi Digital, Solana Labs, and others.

In a recent tweet, IO announced the launch of a points reward program that will continue until the end of April. Additionally, they will launch the IO token at the end of April.

What is io.net?

io.net is a decentralized GPU network designed to provide computing power for ML (machine learning). It aggregates over a million GPUs from independent data centers, cryptocurrency miners, and projects like Filecoin or Render to obtain computational capabilities. The project was founded by Ahmad Shadid, who conceived the idea while building a GPU computing network for the machine learning quantitative trading company Dark Tick in 2020 to reduce costs, later gaining attention at the Austin Solana Hacker House.

How does io.net solve the problem?

Before proposing solutions, let's understand what adverse factors ordinary users or institutions face in acquiring computing resources. First, availability is limited; accessing hardware through cloud services like AWS, GCP, or Azure often takes weeks, and popular GPU models are usually unavailable. Second, there are few options; users have almost no choices regarding GPU hardware, location, security levels, and latency. Third, costs are high: obtaining quality GPUs is very expensive, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly for training and inference.

io.net addresses these issues by aggregating underutilized GPUs (from independent data centers, crypto miners, and projects like Filecoin and Render). These resources, combined with DePIN, enable engineers to access substantial computational power within the system. It allows ML teams to build inference and model service workflows across a distributed GPU network and utilize distributed computing libraries to orchestrate and batch training jobs, enabling parallelization of data and model workloads across many distributed devices.

Additionally, io.net employs a distributed computing library with advanced hyperparameter tuning to examine optimal results, optimize scheduling, and simply specify search patterns. It also utilizes an open-source reinforcement learning library that supports production-grade, highly distributed RL (reinforcement learning) workloads and a simple API.

What is the product portfolio of io.net?

According to the introduction from the official website, its functional product portfolio consists of three main components: IO Cloud, IO Worker, and IO Explorer. IO Cloud aims to deploy and manage on-demand decentralized GPU clusters, seamlessly integrating with IO-SDK to provide a comprehensive solution for scaling AI and Python applications.

IO Worker primarily provides users with a comprehensive and user-friendly interface to effectively manage their supply operations on the web application. The scope of this product includes features related to user account management, monitoring computational activities, real-time data display, temperature and power consumption tracking, installation assistance, wallet management, security measures, and profit calculations.

IO Explorer mainly provides users with comprehensive statistics and visualizations of various aspects of the GPU cloud. It enables users to easily monitor, analyze, and understand the details of the io.net network by providing complete visibility into network activity, key statistics, data points, and reward transactions.

What are the upcoming uses of the IO token?

According to information from the official website, the token's functions include providing allocation incentives for IO Worker, rewarding AI and ML deployment teams for continued use of the network, balancing some demand and supply, pricing IO Worker computational units, and community governance.

To avoid payment issues arising from IO token price fluctuations, io.net has developed a stablecoin, IOSD, pegged to the US dollar. 1 IOSD is always equal to 1 dollar. IOSD can only be obtained by burning IO tokens. Additionally, io.net is considering mechanisms to improve network functionality. For example, it may allow IO Workers to increase their chances of being rented by staking native assets. In this case, the more assets they stake, the greater their chances of being selected. Furthermore, AI engineers who stake native assets can have priority access to high-demand GPUs.

Overview of the IO token mechanism design

The IO token is primarily used for two major groups: demand and supply. For the demand side, each computational job is priced in dollars, and the network will hold payments until the job is completed. Once node operators configure their reward shares in dollars and tokens, all dollar amounts will be directly allocated to the node operators, while the share allocated to tokens will be used to burn IO tokens. Then, all IO tokens minted as computational rewards during that period will be distributed to users based on the dollar value of their coupon tokens (computational credits).

For the supply side, there are availability rewards and computational rewards. The computational rewards are for jobs submitted to the network, where users can choose their time preference for "the duration of cluster deployment in hours" and receive cost estimates from the io.net pricing oracle. Regarding availability rewards, the network will randomly submit small test jobs to assess which nodes run regularly and can accept jobs from the demand side effectively.

It is worth mentioning that both supply and demand sides have a reputation system in place, accumulating scores based on computational performance and network participation to earn rewards or discounts.

In addition, io.net has set up an ecosystem growth mechanism, including staking, invitation rewards, and network fees. IO token holders can choose to stake their IO tokens to node operators or users. Once staked, stakers will receive 1-3% of all rewards earned by participants. Users can also invite new network participants and share a portion of the future income of new participants. Network fees are set at 5%.

Potential airdrop acquisition methods

Currently, the official has not specified the airdrop method, but the author speculates that it may be distributed to active users within the Solana ecosystem, such as RENDER or FIL token holders. Another method, which has a relatively high threshold, involves running a node, which has certain requirements for personal computer configuration and setup; specific details can be found in the official documentation.