
Akash Network (AKT)
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Price of Akash Network today in real time
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Historical price evolution of Akash Network
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Akash Network was born in March 2018 when Greg Osuri and Adam Bozanich founded Overclock Labs in San Francisco, receiving $1.8 million in a seed round to develop a decentralised cloud computing marketplace. In March 2020, the company completed a second seed round of $2 million led by George Burke and Infinite Capital. During that same year, three phases of the incentivised testnet were launched and integration with the Cosmos IBC ecosystem was established.
The launch of Mainnet 1 took place in September 2020, at which point the AKT token entered circulation with an initial supply of 100 million out of a maximum of 388.5 million. In March 2021, Mainnet 2 was deployed, introducing the Akash Marketplace with a reverse auction model, flexible bid pricing and IBC compatibility with other chains in the Cosmos ecosystem. Mainnet 3 arrived in April 2022, incorporating persistent storage, authorised spending and the introduction of the inflation decay curve.
In November 2022, Mainnet 4 was activated, which enabled the leasing of routable public IPs for services and updated the network to Cosmos IBC v3 with Interchain Accounts (ICA). A significant milestone occurred on 6th September 2023 with the launch of Mainnet 6, which introduced native GPU support, stable settlement in USDC and take rates. This update made Akash the first open-source marketplace for high-density GPUs intended for large-scale language models.
On 9th February 2024, the community approved with 97% of votes the $5 million GPU provider incentive programme (Proposal 246), with the objective of incorporating more than 1,000 A100 units to the network within 120 days. During 2024, compute spending on the network grew 749% in dollar terms on an annual basis, driven by demand for GPUs for AI training and inference. In 2025, Akash achieved institutional recognition when Grayscale incorporated AKT into its AI Tools & Resources sector index on 27th May, and Coinbase included AKT in the Coinbase 50 index (COIN50) on 2nd June.
On 28th October 2025, Mainnet 14 was deployed, updating the network to Cosmos SDK v0.53 and eliminating eight years of accumulated technical debt. This version also introduced AkashML, a managed AI inference service presented at the PyTorch conference, which offers 70-85% savings compared to centralised providers. In October 2025, founder Greg Osuri announced the intention to deprecate Akash's Cosmos chain and migrate to a new higher-performance network, evaluating candidates such as Solana. During the first quarter of 2026, Akash Network exceeded $5 million in compute spending, reaching an all-time high with sustained 60% GPU utilisation. On 23rd March 2026, Mainnet 17 implemented the Burn-Mint Equilibrium (BME) model and created the Akash Compute Token (ACT), a stable credit pegged to the dollar where tenants burn AKT to mint ACT and pay for compute, whilst consumed ACT is destroyed and AKT is reminted, structurally linking token scarcity to actual network demand.
AKT functions as the native token of Akash Network, a layer 1 blockchain built on the Cosmos SDK that operates with a Delegated Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. The network functions as a reverse auction marketplace where users who need compute services (tenants) publish their specific CPU, GPU and storage requirements as deployments directly on the blockchain. Service providers, who can range from data centres to individuals with idle compute capacity, compete by submitting bids with decreasing prices. Once the tenant selects the bid that best fits their needs, a lease contract is automatically generated and executed through smart contracts.
Since the Mainnet 17 update (17th March 2026), AKT's tokenomic model operates under the Burn-Mint Equilibrium (BME) system. In this mechanism, tenants must burn AKT tokens to mint ACT (Akash Compute Token), a stable credit pegged to the US dollar that they use to pay for compute services. Providers receive their payments in stable settlements denominated in USD, whilst the ACT consumed during the process is destroyed and simultaneously AKT is reminted as rewards for providers and validators. This cycle creates structural deflationary pressure on AKT's supply that is directly correlated with the level of activity and usage of the network.
In addition to its function in the compute marketplace, AKT serves as a staking and governance token. Validators and their delegators lock AKT tokens to contribute to network security, receiving block rewards in return. In the decentralised governance system, each participant's voting weight is proportional to the amount of AKT they have staked, allowing the community to make decisions about protocol upgrades and changes.
Data verified against external sources. Some values may have changed since the last update.