Thread by @ArbVision

1 of 23) $RNDR or @RenderToken is one of the most intriguing projects I've read about since $SOL. Last week, during @Solana Libson, @JulesUrbach presented about the project and its partnership with @metaplex. After watching, I went down the rabbit hole and here are my thoughts.

2) Disclaimer, last week I did purchase $RNDR ($2 ish) off my initial research. Admittedly, this is way too fast to wrap my head around the project but I did feel some urgency on the back of the announcement. I'll be doing additional research for multiple more months.

3) Ok, so what is $RNDR? Render is a network of GPUs used to help with rendering. If you've watched any movies or played video games with digital 3D graphics, and they looked "real" - that process of making things look real was an intensive computation called rendering.

4) How intensive is this computationally? A fun fact, in Toy Story 4 the most intensive frame took 325 hours to render. To make these chandeliers look realistic, Pixar had to simulate all the lighting bouncing around with some pretty insane physics.

5) As video games get more photo realistic and as the #metaverse becomes more relevant, the demand for rendering is going to grow immensely. The virtual worlds of the future aren't going to look like minecraft. They are going to look like something reality would be envious of.

6) Great, so rendering is important and going to get even more important. Let's dive into the @RenderToken. The company was founded by @JulesUrbach who is up there as one of the most impressive people in tech. A podcast I listened to coined, he is the "Elon Musk of Rendering".

7) He and his team have literally worked their whole lives on rendering, working with Disney to AWS. Listening to him speak is like listening to @ID_AA_Carmack give his talks. If you could select any human to work on decentralized rendering it would be @JulesUrbach.

8) The network setup high level is pretty simple. People provide their GPUs (graphics cards from NVIDIA/AMD) and receive $RNDR token for providing it. People who want to render something, simply pay in $RNDR token. Similar structure ish to a @helium miner or an @ArweaveTeam.

9) Currently, if you want to render something intensive, you have roughly three choices 1) run on your own machine 2) run on the cloud (aws/azure/etc) 3) run on the render network. Let's talk about how 3 works and why it's potentially the future of rendering.

10) Rendering on your own machine for anything intensive is just too slow (think weeks or months). The real question is cloud services vs. the render network. This for me was the golden question.

11) For many decentralized platforms, they are actually more expensive than the centralized options. For storage, you need to pay for extra redundancy (multiple people storing copies) and permanence (it staying their forever). For something like NFTs, that premium is worth it.

12) The render network has an unbelievable property. It can actually be cheaper than cloud rendering. My initial reaction was.. um.. how? For this, I dug up as much as I could and spoke with people on the render team and even got a response from the man himself, @JulesUrbach !

13) There are a number of reasons for this. First, NVIDIA/AMD, who own the graphics card market, charge about 8x more for datacenter versions than the consumer ones you can buy for your computer. Since they own the market and tech companies can afford it, why not? Charge more.

14) Even if that doesn't last forever, CPUs vs GPUs are a very different beast. GPUs are what matter for rendering and their performance is improving much faster than CPUs.

15) So imagine you're a cloud service company. You spend a bunch of upfront CAPEX on a GPU that depreciates in a couple years because the next NVIDIA card made the last one obsolete.

16) On top of the tough capital intensiveness, you now need to compete with the render network that charges roughly .5% when AWS has a 30% margin in most other areas.

17) Further, if AWS paid $1k for a graphics card, they expect to make >$1k. If a company / person buys a graphics card for their work or gaming and doesn't use it 12 hours a day, might as well contribute to the network and earn an extra $200. Hard to compete with a sunk cost.

18) Lastly, there are nearly 100x more GPUs out there with free time than the entire public cloud pool. We basically have a bunch of compelling reasons why the decentralized network can compete.

19) Today, this is not a conceptual project, it's a real one that is operational and has 10,000 active users. Netflix/HBO/etc all use the network. Even @beeple, the $100m NFT man, uses the render token. This network is becoming a standard for rendering NFTs.

20) If rendering and NFTs are getting more popular, you're going to want to make that interaction as seamless as possible. Hence the announcement of the partnership with @metaplex (NFT code made easy) which has been questionably the most important project for @solana.

21) Looking towards the future, Jules shows a number of awesome examples of AR/VR in his talk:

22) So in short, the metaverse is going to be a thing. Rendering is going to be more of a thing. $RNDR is positioned for this future. I still have a lot to learn but wanted to share all the cool stuff going on in this potentially overshadowed world of rendering.

23) Bonus Post: @JulesUrbach had filed for a patent on token based rendering service in 2009.... 2009!!! This isn't a man forcing crypto in to solve a problem; conversely crypto helped make his solution a reality.

patents.google.com/patent/US91976…