Article translation: Block unicorn

Article translation: Block unicorn

Over the past year, Fortnite has pushed the boundaries of massively simultaneous online virtual worlds with concerts (Travis Scott and Ariana Grande in Fortnite). In hindsight, those concerts would be seen as fully fledged metaverses. The universe's first mainstream forerunner (kudos to The Sims and Second Life for trying this before the world was ready).

But Fortnite concerts have a lot of problems. Some of the most notable disadvantages include:

1. The experience is completely controlled by one entity, Epic Games, the creators of Fortnite (though to be clear, we are big Epic fans).

2. The number of people who can interact in a space is capped at around 150 people, so the vast majority of viewers engage in different versions of an ideally shared experience.

3. The IP of the event itself and any derivative output are also owned by Epic.

I don't say this to blame Epic. In fact, I applaud Epic for their efforts to pioneer these guys. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney cut a long story short about the need for a Metaverse, repeatedly emphasizing that the Metaverse should not be controlled by corporations, but be trusted to be neutral.

Mediation of these virtual worlds by centralized parties is inherently against the spirit of the open metaverse. Walled gardens create platform lock-in, intermediary costs, and most importantly, make it harder for assets and experiences to interoperate via composable cryptographic primitives. Each of these limits the creation, engagement, and monetization of the new, ambitious media we expect in the Metaverse.

In order to truly scale the Metaverse to billions of people, we're still missing some critical technical infrastructure. At a minimum, we need:

1. Scalable blockchains that are optimized for DeFi and remain composable (e.g. Solana).

2. Scalable public data stores (such as Ceramic and Textile) for data-centric (rather than financial-centric) applications.

3. Capable of public data sets and user data streams (such as Fluence).

4. Massive off-chain computations to render trillions of digital objects with high fidelity (e.g. Render Network).

5. Permanent file storage (for example, Arweave) for storing digital representations of assets.

6. Real-time index + query system, retrieve data and files on demand

7. Powerful AR and VR modes.

Blockchain and other web3 systems are the foundation of the Metaverse. We have thought about these questions for a long time and written about the Web3 stack on many occasions. The stack is maturing and becoming more capable of supporting the Metaverse experience.

Today, I am pleased to announce that Multicoin Capital has led a $30M funding round into Render Network to address problem #4 listed above. Our friends at Alameda Ventures, Sfermion and The Solana Foundation also attended, along with angels Vinny Lingham and Bill Lee.

Render trillions of objects

Creating 3D or holographic digital media is computationally intensive. Most digital art created today, including most 3D NFTs, requires hours of dedicated GPU time. Rendering requires these assets to programmatically simulate the process of light passing through surfaces, textures, and materials in a raw scene file to produce a realistic image. The computational demands of rendering are significant and have grown exponentially as resolution and frame rate standards have increased to create high-fidelity virtual worlds.

Toys has been at the forefront of rendering software for over a decade. Their flagship application, Octane, is the first GPU-accelerated, unbiased, physically correct renderer and is widely regarded as the best of its kind. All major movie studios, including Disney, use Octane for VFX, as well as tens of thousands of digital artists, including Buzzer, White, and FVKRNDR. This Westworld title sequence, by Lil Nas X for MONTERO The music video, as well as the Frieze viewing room in Los Angeles were rendered in Octane. Apple's Octane features a metal home above the fold.

Jules Urbach, founder and CEO of OTOY, developed an Imagination service for the Metaverse when he founded OTOY in 2008 more than a decade ago. Over the past 13 years, OTOY has built content creation tools and rendering engines capable of creating the trillions of objects that will make up the Metaverse.

In order to build the Metaverse, content creation tools and rendering engines alone are not enough. The Metaverse will require astronomical amounts of computing power: orders of magnitude more than is available in all the data centers in the world combined.

The only way to get that much computing power is to take advantage of the hundreds of millions of potential GPUs that consumers around the world have. Launched in 2017, Render Network aims to capitalize on this latent supply. The rendering network allows the distribution and processing of complex GPU-based rendering jobs over a large distributed peer-to-peer network. This enables creators to compute at unprecedented scale and price, with stronger privacy guarantees than any existing cloud provider.

We've been investing in infinitely scalable Web3 primitives over the past few years, most notably Arweave and Livepeer counterparts, each of these primitives is focused on a very specific functional task. Arweave provides permanent storage, Livepeer decentralized video transcoding network.

The Render network is optimized to run bounded (non-open), highly parallelized tasks that do not require synchronous network connections. The most common workloads that meet these criteria are digital rendering and training models for machine learning.

Today, Render Network supports major digital content creation tools including Cinema4D, 3DS Max, Unreal Engine, and Unity. In the near future, it will support rendering engines such as Arnold and Redshift in addition to Octane. The ultimate goal of the network is to support any workload that conforms to the network's ORBX scene data standard and seamlessly interface with any number of signaling and marketplace platforms to facilitate the creation and maintenance of rich, immersive digital content.

Each incremental data and bandwidth product improvement, licensing expansion, and order matching increase increases Render Network's addressable market. The rendering network produced physically accurate renderings of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek Archives, Beeple's Days, and Star Trek Scenes (29:19 - 29:38), as seen in Apple's October 2021 keynote presentation, and using existing Some cloud providers are faster and more cost-effective than others. Render Network is live and is powering some of the largest and most configured rendering jobs in the world.

The Render network also stores the hashes of all the assets that the system uses to build the source renders for the job to be done. This takes on new meaning and creates another layer of provenance before tokenization. This raw data, combined with a persistent storage infrastructure like Arweave, has the potential to revolutionize our collective understanding of the origin and ownership of digital objects.

billion dollar arbitrage

Renting GPUs from any of the major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.) is notoriously expensive and often impossible to rent in large quantities.

Capitalism requires cloud providers to be responsive to market demands. However, they didn't. How is this going?

There is nothing wrong with cloud providers. Instead, the problem is with the hardware: Nvidia won't allow their flagship consumer graphics cards (such as the 2080 or 3080) to be deployed with cloud providers. Instead, they sell workstation cards under the Tesla or Quadro brand that cost up to 10x the price but only offer 20-25% the computing power.

looking to the future

looking to the future

Render Network launched in 2017, but few cryptocurrency investors have heard of it. I didn't know until a few months ago. Render Network has been in closed beta for the past few years. The Octane and Render Network communities have been optimizing the system over the years to ensure the best possible experience for creators.

At Solana's Breakpoint conference in early November, the Render team announced that they were moving the RNDR token and a major portion of the Render network to the Solana blockchain. This migration will happen over the course of 2022, and as 3rd developers build higher-level applications using render networks, this will open up an incredible amount of opportunity for cryptographic primitives to be combined.