Why is Render Token (RNDR) outperformer of the Year
3 min readRegular daily winner, performer of the month and one of the absolute outliers among the altcoins in the bear market: the Render Token has risen from 40 cents to around 2.5 US dollars since the beginning of the year, by a total of 500 percent. With a market capitalization of almost one billion US dollars, the ERC-20 token ranks 54th among the most valuable crypto projects. Is there future hope behind the explosive growth – or just another crypto pump?
A close partnership with Apple, prestigious consultants such as Hollywood director JJ Abrams (“Star Trek”, “Star Wars”), NFT star Beeple and an Oscar-winning video production company from series pioneer HBO as the originators of the project: Render undoubtedly shines with big names. The vision: to become the engine for 3D video art worldwide with a decentralized network of graphics cards.
Render is a boon for video creators
The video production company OTOY, based in Los Angeles, started Render in 2017 with an ICO, two years later Ethereum went mainnet. OTOY itself produces videos for HBO (the clip for the hit series “Westworld”) and publishes a very successful program for rendering 3D videos, the Octane Renderer. Founder of OTOY and Render Network is Jules Urbach, who has already won an Oscar for another of the company’s technologies (Lightstage). OTOY and Render advisors include Google founder Eric Schmidt (OTOY only), Mozilla founder Brave Eich (both), Beeple (both) and JJ Abrams (Render only).
The idea behind the project: Render provides computer performance against payment in tokens or soon FIAT money. To do this, it relies on a network of nodes, each of which operates its own graphics card (GPU). A blessing for video artists: Rendering every animation costs computing power and time. Average according to ChatGPT: 177 hours for 1,000 frames. Render supposedly reduces the duration to a tenth. Expensive supercomputers or hardware farms: no longer necessary. The computing load is shouldered by PCs and smartphones worldwide. Everyone has a graphics card in their device and can theoretically always make it available to the network when they are not using it – and earn money with it.
Render and Apple
The biggest success of the project: an integration with Apple that was announced in February. Octane Renderer by OTOY is pre-installed on all devices from the MacBookPro to the iPhone, giving you access to Render. The price of the token should also be fueled by the recent announcement of Apple’s new mixed reality headset, which many investors have high hopes for.
The render network is also growing continuously, at least on the on-chain side. The number of Render hodlers grew according to Dune Analytics from 50,000 to over 70,000 since the beginning of the year. Of these, only 800 are whales with more than 10,000 tokens. In addition, there are another 8,000 hodlers from Render to Polygon Ethereum’s Layer2 solution.
Render’s Q1 report from 2023, on the other hand, looks rather disappointing. Only two percent more images were rendered compared to Q2 of 2022, a total of 2.1 million pieces. Recently a beta of the image AI stable diffusion has been integrated. They can be used to generate images by entering text (prompt).
Ambitious future plans
Two more changes were announced in Q1 of 2023. Render is migrating from Ethereum to the blockchain Solana by the end of the year. A burn mechanism is also implemented. Whenever users demand processing power, tokens are burned and disappear from circulation, even if users pay with fiat money.
Some tweets and Telegram messages from the Render founder also fuel speculation that the project will also integrate language learning models like ChatGPT in the near future. “For us, the emergence of these LLMs that could run on our nodes is a boon.” Language learning models require massive computing power to operate, which, according to media reports, is already running out.