Akash Network and Polygon Join Forces to Onboard Thousands of Dapps to 8.4m Strong Distributed Cloud Hosting Network

November 22, 2021

Akash Network and Polygon Join Forces to Onboard Thousands of Dapps to 8.4m Strong Distributed Cloud Hosting Network

Incentivized bounties offer Polygon’s dapp developers a path from traditional cloud to Akash Network’s decentralized infrastructure — enabling radical cost savings and lower risk of outages

Polygon, an Ethereum scaling platform onboarding millions to Web3, today announces it has joined forces with Akash Network, a distributed peer-to-peer market for cloud compute and leading infrastructure provider for web 3.0, to encourage dapps to migrate from centralized cloud services. The joint venture will allow developers a cost-effective option to deploy and scale their applications and services while eliminating their reliance on a single cloud provider.

By running their dapps on Akash’s decentralized network, developers can tap into 8.4 million data centers and adopt a decentralized stance more consistent with the vision of dapps. They can also break free of vendor lock-in and constantly changing terms of service associated with traditional cloud companies.

Developers can deploy apps to cloud-hosted containers using Akash Network at half the cost of traditional cloud giants like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, making it an easy decision for developers who are tied to the centralized providers to migrate away.

As a part of this partnership, Akash has launched a new program, dubbed the Akash Polygon-athon, for dapps running on Polygon’s network. By migrating away from the traditional cloud providers and moving workloads to the Akash Network, each dapp that migrates to Akash will be rewarded with a bounty of $100 in the Akash Token (AKT).

According to industry analysts Gartner, user organizations are increasingly looking to reduce critical lock-in and, most pressingly, eliminate single points of failure with their cloud providers. Indeed, per data Etherenodes.org, a sizable proportion of Ethereum nodes (approximately 32%) currently run via AWS — something which could result in a significant disruption should AWS suffer an outage.

Even the largest centralized cloud infrastructure providers are prone to outages, sometimes on a global basis. According to CNN, Verizon, Microsoft, and Google were just some of the cloud providers to see their services interrupted so far this year. A Google outage in November affected multiple popular websites, apps, and services, including Snapchat, Spotify, Etsy, Pokemon Go, Discord, Target, Shopify, and Nest.

Polygon is a full-stack scaling solution built to improve Ethereum by processing transactions in a more efficient fashion and connecting different blockchains. The leading Ethereum scaling platform achieves this via its array of scaling solutions, including Polygon PoS, Polygon SDK, Polygon Avail, Polygon Nightfall, and Polygon Hermez. This provides a way for developers to scale their dapps and use them across different blockchains. Polygon provides a starter kit to developers including instructions for hosting on Akash Network.

More than 70% of Polygon’s 700 dapps are related to decentralized finance (DeFi) and provide investing, lending, and various other financial services. These include DeFi bluechip dapps such as Sushiswap, Curve, Aave, Balancer, and Kyber.

Developers are also building dapps for gaming, collecting (NFTs), social platforms, blogs, and more, with Polygon boasting the likes of Dolce & Gabbana, OpenSea, NFT artist Beeple, DraftKings, Tom Brady's Autograph, and Mark Cuban’s Lazy.com.

Greg Osuri, founder and CEO at Akash Network, comments: “DeFi companies and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are a natural fit for the Akash Network. Like DeFi and DAOs, Akash is founded on the principle of permissionless, open access and does not decide who can use the marketplace. Akash is a community-driven open-source project that allows anyone to contribute.”

Polygon developers are encouraged to apply for up to $100,000 from the Akash Developer Grant Program, which will be welcoming projects running on Polygon. Support for Polygon dapps will be funded through a bounty hosted by Akash and Gitcoin. Visit the Akash Community Forum to learn how to apply for the program.

If you're an Ethereum Developer, you're already a Polygon developer. Leverage Polygon’s fast and secure txns for your dApp, get started here.