Render Network Announces Key Integration With Solana & Metaplex

Published on: 09.11.2021

Render Network is excited to announce a new technology roadmap to bring the core components of the network’s infrastructure to Solana, starting with a partnership with Metaplex, a decentralized protocol and set of open standards for digital asset issuance and ownership on-chain.

The mission for the Render Network has always been to create the toolsets and technological infrastructure to realize the promise of an open metaverse. The core function of the Render Network to date has been to utilize and distribute GPU resources across a distributed network of consumer-grade devices. This has made it possible for artists to access the computing power necessary to build rich, immersive worlds with high fidelity at a scale and speed previously unattainable.

However, access to computing power is only a starting point. Interoperable standards around issuance, provenance, and exchange of digital assets incredibly neutral environments are core to the ethos of an open metaverse. A shared, persistent environment requires strong guarantees around ownership, and decentralization across every possible layer of the stack.

The core developers at the Render Network have assessed that Solana is the most programmable and secure underlying infrastructure for its future development plans as it continues to scale and take on massive, metaverse-scale rendering jobs.

Through deep integration with both Solana and Metaplex, Render Network can become a platform where artists can create valuable IP, art, and tools that can be issued and owned natively on Solana, with distribution and monetization functions provided directly through Metaplex — with one click.

The Render Network has been at the forefront of the NFT movement, used by many of the leading 3D crypto artists, accounting for over half a billion dollars in NFT sales in 2021. Recently Render has worked on Metaverse archives spanning the works of Alex Ross, the legendary Marvel and DC Comic book artist, Beeple, one of the most renowned NFT artists who helped pioneer the Everyday art movement, and Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek — all preserving a lifetime of their creations on the blockchain for future generations to experience. Over time, all creative compositions and published work passing through the Render Network will natively be archived on-chain, with simple options to export portable Metaverse content and art, mint NFTs based on them, and issue them immediately on Metaplex with maximum fidelity, composability, and interactivity. This pipeline, combined with novel forms of coordination around artists and NFTs on Solana, fractionalized ownership, novel auction mechanisms, and DAO-based coordination tools represent only a few of the primitives being built over NFTs which will enable a more streamlined and powerful experience for artists, IP holders, and digital creators.

Solana’s high throughput and low latency uniquely enable decentralization of core rendering processes beyond what’s currently possible on the network today. As part of the technical roadmap, the Render Network intends to fund the development of open-source Rust GPU cross-compiler tools for the RNDR SDK that lets developers target both the Solana smart contract VM and Render Network GPU nodes with identical code. This provides an unprecedented level of transparency into the rendering and computes process, and orders of magnitude higher composability and interoperability for heterogeneous computing on the blockchain. It also massively expands the design space for real-time 3D collaboration, shared ownership, and monetization for composable digital assets as the Render Network scales the ‘Proof of Render’ model to real-time, billion-user mirror worlds and simulations.

This is the first of several technical and network-related announcements that are planned for Q4 2021. The Render Network is committed to the shared effort of building an open, freely accessible metaverse. The values the network embodies are a foundational precept for arriving at a healthy metaverse, one that isn’t threatened by centralized platforms, vendor lock-in, ‘dopamine auto-tuned ads, or similar dystopian vectors.