Development and Mid-term Milestones of the Render Network

Author: Render

Compiled by: ChainCatcher

Usage remained stable between Q1 2023 and Q4 2022, while the network expanded its use cases and improved key functionalities for scaling the network, including progress on native Cinema4D and multi-render support, a more powerful ORBX export tool, which is a key mid-term milestone facilitating the running of Stable Diffusion prompts directly from the Render Network creator portal, and the development of a new AI-assisted rendering suite previewed at GTC 2023. Stable usage combined with accelerated progress in expanding the network's product range—encompassing both existing users and new applications—positions the Render Network for continued growth throughout the remainder of the year.

If you are new to the project or catching up, here is a great statement about what the network is:

The Render Network utilizes a decentralized GPU processing model to provide near real-time rendering to meet the growing GPU compute demands of users—suitable for both current 3D rendering tasks and emerging 3D applications. The network allows for increased rendering speed for artists using a single model while reducing costs and scaling. It enhances capital efficiency by leveraging idle GPU compute power and rewarding GPU providers for their services. It also creates opportunities for open access to an increasing number of rendering and rendering-related software providers.

We review statistics quarterly and publish them to our community to look for trends and opportunities. Feel free to join our Discord or Telegram, and let us know if you see anything we haven't mentioned! Without further ado, let's dive into the numbers:

Overall, the Render Network's usage remained stable in Q1 2023, with a total of 2,119,813 frames rendered, a 2% increase from Q4 2022.

After a relatively slow start compared to Q4 2022, we saw an uptick in activity in March 2023, rendering 840,804 frames, resulting in the allocation of 235,955 RNDR, which is an increase of 15% and 29% respectively compared to the 729,448 frames and 182,717 RNDR distributed in December 2022. This surge pushed the overall usage for Q1 2023 above that of Q4 2022.

Tier 3 network usage increased, reaching a balance of nearly 20% node utilization in some cases, which is the goal for effective supply-demand balance. At these levels, utilization is high enough to meet the marginal cost demands of nodes while the network maintains sufficient supply overhead to accommodate spikes in usage and avoid congestion (which is detrimental to all network participants), which is particularly important for creators.

At Tier 2, while we saw an overall decline in jobs, we did see a growth in smaller frame jobs created through our API for B2B services, leveraging decentralized rendering on the network to build 3D services. While current B2B usage is concentrated on smaller frame sequences for certain applications, these could scale to larger frame sequences as the network and 3D economy expand.

From this usage bifurcation, it is evident that the absolute number of jobs has shifted to Tier 2, while most of the work from OctaneBench has moved to Tier 3, allowing for economical classification of network usage to meet the needs of different users. B2B users are building commercial applications at scale on the foundation of the network's decentralized rendering, leveraging the consistency and reliability of Tier 2 premium rendering services, while consumers and price-sensitive artists are increasing their use of Tier 3 to offload intensive rendering demands to the network. This differentiated usage allows the network to expand its services by offering more specialized products to meet a wider variety of user needs.

The patterns exhibited between Tier 2 and Tier 3 in Q1 demonstrate the product's appeal to both user groups, further developing differentiated product tiers with the destruction of RNP-002 and the implementation of the minting balance (BME). Specifically, as Tier 3 begins to reach saturation levels of over 20%+ node utilization, it enables the network to expand its premium Tier 2 services for B2B users as well as artists needing highly predictable, accelerated, or specialized rendering services. As more of these intensive or time-sensitive workflows shift to Tier 2, it reduces congestion in Tier 3, allowing more price-sensitive artists to seamlessly offload rendering work that would otherwise be done locally to the Render Network—utilizing cheap, fast decentralization to render more intensively in their creative workflows. A virtuous cycle emerges, where effective classification of user preferences allows the network to sustainably expand its services for both B2B users and price-sensitive consumers while increasing the utilization of nodes that need to operate above marginal costs to run sustainably.

While usage remained stable in Q1 2023, significant development work has been done to enhance network functionality for current users and expand the Render Network ecosystem in 2023—positioning the network to increase usage frequency among existing artists and reach new community developers and creators.

A major barrier for artists accessing the Render Network is exporting scenes as ORBX files. Export times for certain scenes can be lengthy, and exporting complex geometries and effects has been a bottleneck for many artists. Due to export times, artists often abandon using the Render Network. With a series of ORBX export development fixes delivered at the end of Q1 2023, this bottleneck is gradually being eliminated—improving export speed, stability, and functionality to better fit the UI in artists' workflows. As noted in previous Behind the Network posts, feedback from C4D users in the Render Network community over the past few years has been crucial in prioritizing usability fixes for the exporter. With this in mind, we created a straightforward pathway to allow easy export of ORBX directly from the live viewer panel, which can be found here in the knowledge base.

On the network side, frequent users may have noticed the addition of Stable Diffusion services as an option on the Render Network creator portal this quarter. The emergence of AI-generated content has been one of the fastest-growing markets in the history of the consumer internet. As indicated throughout discussions over the past few years, and featured at the network's initial launch, the infrastructure of the Render Network is designed to play a key role in harnessing AI to power the future of the emerging post-industrial creative economy. This expansion natively incorporates a simple prompt creation suite for Stable Diffusion into the Render Network creator portal, marking the first step in many future-oriented initiatives to enter the AI space in the coming years.

As we highlighted in our GTC 2023 recap article, many technologies are being developed and appearing on the network that enable the Render Network not only to maintain its trajectory from Q1 2023 but also to enter a growth phase in the foreseeable quarters. Between NeRF, light field technology expansions, and the NFT toolkit—including deep on-chain metadata from Render Graph supporting real-time streaming applications, complex digital rights management (DRM), and next-generation virtual reality deep source assets—the network continues to expand its product suite. In addition to the previously mentioned Stable Diffusion expansion and the currently existing multi-render options, the ongoing diversification of network services towards holographic applications and 3D assets positions the network well at the center of the emerging virtual economy.

As the network expands into broader use cases, including Stable Diffusion jobs with rendering and multi-render support, modernized token economic infrastructure, payment infrastructure, and blockchain infrastructure are crucial for supporting network expansion. Last week, RNP-002 and RNP-003 were approved through community voting to implement the destruction and minting balance using the Solana blockchain, enabling low-cost, high-throughput transaction infrastructure to automate complex real-time multi-party payment processes. At the same time, RNP-003 allows the Render Foundation to acquire resources to accelerate the implementation of network priorities approved during the community governance process, starting with the implementation of the destruction and minting balance (BME) of RNP-002. The passage of both RNPs helps accelerate the implementation of new features that contribute to the more efficient operation of the network, enabling it to sustainably scale a multi-sided network.

The Render Network has maintained consistent usage levels while releasing several important new features that will allow the network to continue growing in the second half of 2023. In Q1, the network began to exhibit unique and coordinated usage patterns, indicating the potential to increase user acquisition across multiple user categories (B2B and consumers) simultaneously through specially designed product features and incentive structures, to more effectively accommodate these use cases in the upcoming implementation work now governed by the network. The network also previewed some exciting emerging technologies in holographic media, streaming AI, and virtual assets, providing Render with new opportunities to expand the services it offers to users. Finally, the network community approved two significant governance initiatives that will enable the network to accelerate the implementation of product improvements in 2023, serving an increasing absolute number and variety of user categories.