Akash Network is giving up its own blockchain. On October 26 the decentralized cloud-compute marketplace opened governance proposal #346, which asks AKT holders to approve leaving the network’s sovereign Cosmos chain, akashnet-2, and rebuilding the marketplace as native programs on Solana. Voting runs through November 2 and needs a 33.4% quorum and a simple majority to pass.
The decision is a cost calculation more than a technology bet. Akash runs about 100 validators whose only job is to secure consensus, and its core team maintains its own forks of cosmos-sdk, CometBFT and gogoproto. On Solana every program inherits security from the existing validator set, with no bonding and no SOL stake required of Akash itself. The team frames the difference in dollars: network fees for the entire marketplace come to about 0.075 SOL per day.
The headroom argument runs the same direction. A median Solana transaction costs about $0.001, and Akash’s roughly 15,000 daily marketplace transactions are a rounding error next to Solana’s 112 million daily user transactions. Even at a hundred times today’s load, the team argues, Akash would not meaningfully dent Solana’s throughput or its fee economics.
Akash is also joining a crowd that already settled there. Helium, Render, io.net, Hivemapper and Nosana run on Solana, and Helium’s 2023 retirement of its own chain is the closest precedent for what Akash is attempting. Liquidity follows the same path: Solana ranks first in weekly DEX volume and carries about $15 billion in stablecoins.
The migration is deliberately sequenced, and the order matters for anyone holding AKT. The token moves first. Two weeks after the proposal passes, and only after two independent audits clear the token and portal code, AKT relaunches as a Solana SPL token at a one-to-one ratio. A one-way migration portal stays open for two years. Staked AKT must be unstaked first, which carries a 21-day unbonding period.
The marketplace moves later and separately. A second governance vote, the cutover proposal, sets that date only after additional audits and migration rehearsals pass. Live workloads keep running on the current chain until cutover; tenants keep their SDL files and leases, while providers upgrade one daemon and re-register.
The trade-offs are explicit. Akash gives up sovereign consensus, validator income, native IBC and the ‘own chain’ story. What stays undecided matters as much as what is set: the cutover has no date, staking rewards continue until it happens, and a governance rejection would send the program back to option analysis.
For the wider infrastructure market, the decision fits a pattern that has been building since Helium left its own chain. Akash’s survey of its codebase found nothing in the marketplace that needs its own consensus — no custom transaction handling and no per-block sweeps, because escrow settles lazily. That is the quiet conclusion behind the migration: a chain is overhead unless the application actually uses it.
Source: BlockchainReporter.