About the editor: Spencer Noon is an independent crypto investor. Looking to get in touch? DM him on Telegram or reply to this email and say hi 👋

OurNetwork Is Powered By Polygon 💜. Be sure to check out the new hyper-scalable DeFi hub emerging on Polygon zkEVM.

Today I am thrilled to share an exciting update with you all, which is that Polygon Labs has signed on to sponsor the newsletter. This is a major development for OurNetwork and our community (more on this below) so we are very thankful for their support.

Above all else, it was important to me that we found a sponsor who deeply understood our mission and values, and with Polygon Labs I’m confident we’ve done just that. I have had the chance to get to know the Polygon community, including the Polygon Labs team, quite well over the past few years. It is filled with leading technologists and good-faith actors who have made meaningful contributions to our space. But during my conversations with the team, it quickly became clear how they were aligned with our mission to deliver community-driven crypto analytics and education as well.

So moving forward, while nothing about our content or editorial process will change, you can expect to see a short message from the Polygon Labs team each week, often about new ecosystem initiatives — I highly encourage you all to engage and check them out. I am a regular Polygon user myself and have always appreciated the community’s commitment to usability and scalability.

Finally, thanks to their support, we are now able to invest in a number of new initiatives at OurNetwork related to long-term sustainability and growth. I hinted at a few of these last week and we should have a few concrete updates soon. Now let’s dive into this week’s coverage!

• With 7,000+ dashcams distributed worldwide, Hivemapper’s reach now extends to more than 90 countries. The decentralized network enables anyone to contribute street-level imagery from anywhere in the world, which it transforms into a fresh global map using AI. This inclusiveness has fostered a vibrant international community that has quickly scaled the collection of map data beyond the US and Europe, generating substantial world coverage in a matter of months.

• Outpacing the early days of Google Street View, Hivemapper has mapped 50 million total km in 8 months, 5 million km of those being unique roads. The dashcam network has already eclipsed smartphone-based projects like Meta’s Mapillary, with 3+ billion street-level images to Mapillary’s 1.8 billion.

• Contributors are submitting an average of over 900 km of road data weekly. Thanks to healthy adoption by gig drivers and truckers, this rate has surged tenfold since early 2023. The firmware of our purpose-built dashcams is continually being updated to maximize data quality and network reliability.

💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: This is an example of a HONEY Burst, where a user was rewarded with 500 HONEY tokens as a bounty for targeted mapping. The feature, launched the first week of September, allows anyone to use HONEY to set bounties on areas in need of mapping, incentivizing contributors with bonus rewards. It illustrates the dynamic between community engagement and resource allocation, as well as the HONEY token's role in balancing supply and demand on Hivemapper.

• Filecoin is the largest decentralized storage network. The team launched the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) in March, which brought smart contracts to the Filecoin network. Deposits into the FVM have steadily grown since launch and are currently over 7M FIL ($22M).

• The Filecoin liquid staking market has been growing quickly, nearly doubling since I last covered Filecoin in June. A healthy and competitive market has emerged with three separate staking providers each controlling 25%+ of the market.

• Saturn is an open-source content delivery network (CDN) built on Filecoin. It has been growing quickly and is at almost 5K nodes. Saturn functions in Filecoin’s retrieval market. Saturn nodes earn $FIL by providing websites with fast, low-cost content delivery.

💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: FilaDoge - a memcoin celebrating the FVM launch - has caught on and has by far the most unique users of any FVM contract. More than 500K addresses have interacted with the FilaDoge contract.

• Akash is a decentralized Supercloud, a cloud computing network that combines the resources of multiple public and private clouds into a single, unified platform with a peer-to-peer marketplace to buy and sell computing resources, such has high-density GPUs. High-density GPUs such as NVIDIA H100 and A100 devices — with high on-chip memory — are critical for Artificial Intelligence applications and are extremely hard to acquire on traditional Cloud. At present, the count of GPUs being employed (93) on Akash surpasses the quantity available (88), and the number of GPUs has been increasing over the past days.

• Akash is now the only network to offer high-density chipsets such as NVIDIA H100s, A100s, and V100s for general-purpose computing with 181 chipsets available and growing daily. Each H100 is equivalent to 78 NVIDIA 3090 in terms of FP64 FLOPS.

• Akash has 66 active GPU providers and growing. This upward trend indicates a robust and healthy expansion of the network, reinforcing its resilience against potential threats. With such a rapid increase, the system's capacity to handle a larger volume of transactions and provide better service is also significantly enhanced.

💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: Users deploying machine learning workloads on NVIDIA H100s — the most advanced GPU made by NVIDIA — on a permissionless and peer-to-peer network, challenge the notion that decentralized networks are not as powerful as centralized ones. This implies that AIs will possess a boundless capacity to self-replicate without any form of restriction.

• Render is a distributed marketplace for GPU-intensive rendering jobs. The network matches GPU requesters looking for affordable rendering power with GPU providers that have excess capacity. On-chain payments to GPU providers are down -43% Q/Q in USD terms; however, OTOY's (development company behind Render Network) payments to GPU providers are often delayed significantly. In this case, what seems like a relative decline in on-chain payments is likely attributable to ‘catch up’ payments to GPU providers by OTOY in 2Q23 (as well as a spike in RNDR price).

• Quarterly unique Render GPU providers is down -45% Q/Q and -55% Y/Y despite increasing active OB power and active node count. This corresponds with increasing network centralization/consolidation. In 3Q23, 14 node operators earned >50% of the rewards, 57 earned >90%, and 116 earned >99%. In 3Q22, 22 providers earned >50%, 94 earned >90%, and 219 earned >99%.

• At 1,538,510 active OB power (a measure of GPU compute power) in 2Q23, the RNDR network features the equivalent of 11,655 GTX 1080s (older high-end card) or 1,205 RTX 4090s (next-gen, top-tier card) in compute performance for artists to utilize. This is up 19% Q/Q from 1,291,396 in 1Q23.

💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: Legendary artist Beeple is on the OTOY and RNDR Advisory Boards. This is a transaction from one of several Render Treasury wallets to Beeple representing the vesting of RNDR tokens. Beeple received an upfront sum of 1,333,333 RNDR in 04/2022 and a transfer of 111,111 RNDR each subsequent month. In total he's received over 3,000,000 RNDR (equivalent to >$5.31M).

• Livepeer is a decentralized video streaming infrastructure network coordinated by Ethereum based smart contracts. In the month of August, the network was used by developers to power 11.7M minutes of unique video, seeing weekly fees paid to node operators rise above $8000, across many different web2 and web3 applications.

• The Livepeer network participation rate has been below the 50% target for a majority of 2023, leading to a steadily increasing participation incentive, with annual yield on staked LPT sitting at 32.2%, and rising until the target is exceeded. (Chart displays round based inflation which is every 21 hours).

• In addition to inflationary LPT rewards, node operators earn ETH for video transcoding jobs on the network. This 30-day payout chart highlights the top 25 nodes brining in between 0.25-3.74 ETH.