The Future of Rendering: photons, tokens and next steps towards a blockchain driven metaverse

CEO and Co-Founder Jules Urbach introduces the Render Token

Jules Urbach Introducing the Render Token (RNDR)

When I started OTOY, my goal was to build an open system that enabled anyone to render and remix simulated reality as effortlessly as the web did for text and digital media.

A decentralized and open global rendering system is foundational for disruptive services and platforms to evolve from the post-mobile world of immersive computing, just as the open web was for in the creation of Google, Amazon and Facebook.

Over the span of 10 years, OTOY has developed revolutionary technology to democratize rendering for all, exemplified best through OctaneRender, the world’s first and fastest GPU-accelerated, unbiased, and physically correct renderer. OctaneRender uses cheap GPUs found in nearly any PC to generate photoreal images and media in near real time, at a quality that surpasses cinematic CPU rendering that takes hours longer.

In order to support the emerging media of tomorrow driven by AR and VR, it is crucial to be able to bridge the gap between the promise of these breakthroughs and the feasibility of widespread access to them. This is why we are pleased to announce the Render Token, a blockchain-based worldwide rendering network solution where GPU work is spent and valued tracing photons, not hashing numbers.

Our aim is for the Render Token to make the process of rendering and streaming photorealistic simulations and services easy and accessible to everyone. It will allow complex GPU-based render jobs to be distributed and processed on a peer-to-peer network, making the transactional process of rendering and streaming 3D environments, mixed reality experiences, and virtual objects much simpler for end users and content creators. Furthermore, its integration with the Ethereum network means there is robust and indisputable digital rights resolution built into the service. This is essential for resolving permanent state changes in shared 3D scenes, for which time-stamped proof of authorship and re-composition rights is needed.

From industrial engineers and architects testing light leakage in CAD models, to scientists simulating galaxy formation in the early Universe, to creators and consumers tapping into bursts of massive raytracing power to share holographic virtual worlds and experiences, a distributed GPU rendering system on the blockchain taps into massive simulation resources at a low cost.

The Render Token, by design, marks a fundamental shift in maximizing GPU compute value in the crypto-community. GPU hashing incurs real world energy and cap-ex costs which return less and less value to the crypto-community as the blockchain grows. Over time, and on a global scale, this becomes enormously wasteful as GPU compute cycles are essentially thrown away hashing numbers with no intrinsic human value, while GPU rendering power on AWS remains scarce at $14.4/hour ( ~1000 OctaneBench).

The Render Token recalibrates the weighting of GPUs in the network, making it possible for each transaction on the blockchain to validate far greater value of equivalent GPU proof-of-render work that is valuable for real world jobs that are prohibitively expensive to fulfill quickly on local or centralized GPUs.

Eventually, as rendering photorealistic scenes on GPUs becomes more energy efficient through raytracing and AI de-noising ASICs, we believe that users will be able to fulfill more and more jobs with less and less hardware, latency and energy costs. New render jobs will then trend more towards real time composition, validation and re-streaming of dynamic scene state changes.

In the coming days and weeks, we will map out important information regarding the Render Token sale and how blockchain token operations are used to power GPU render job work, allocation, latency and data ingestion and output.

Anyone with a modern GPU connected to the internet is welcome to join this ecosystem. The goal of this token sale is to accelerate the development of an open and sustainable metaverse, backed by the blockchain, and rendered on the world’s collective GPU compute power.

It is a revolution worth every cycle.

To find out more about the Render Token, visit www.rendertoken.com and feel free to join us on our RocketChat here!