Submit Your Art for Miami Art Week!

Do you have a 3D art concept that would look great displayed on a 50 foot wall in Miami? We’re looking for artists to submit for Miami After Dark, this December.

More info in the Announcements section. Or submit here.

Ecosystem metrics

The Render Network Foundation tracks various metrics on its network. Below is the aggregate view of the month’s activity, previous month’s activity, and month-over-month change for a few key metrics.

Looking for definitions of each of these terms? Check out our previous monthly reports.

Product Updates

With Dispersed, You Can Do So Much. We Wrote About It.

Four new pieces published this month explore how the infrastructure lessons of a decade of distributed rendering are now showing up in AI compute:

From Render Farms to AI Compute: What a Decade of Distributed Rendering Taught Us About AI Infrastructure

Using artist Muhammet Altun’s (MHX) daily Bitcoin-sculpture project Bitmap as a case in point, we show how generation time dropped from 35 hours to 15 minutes, and cost from roughly $8 to a few cents per piece using a combination of Dispersed and Render Network.

We lay out our argument for why the infrastructure AI compute needs now (for things like heterogeneous job matching, container-native portability, ephemeral execution, and idle-capacity pricing) is the same architecture rendering networks like Render Network have run at scale since 2017. dispersed.com/blog-posts/from-render-farms-to-ai-compute

Web3 Compute vs. Web2 Cloud Infrastructure: What’s Actually Different on a Decentralized GPU Network

A breakdown of what’s genuinely different between a network like Dispersed and a traditional hyperscaler. It covers who owns the hardware, how idle-capacity economics reshape pricing, and how tokenholder governance changes who gets to decide what the network does next. It highlights where centralized cloud is a better fit and where decentralized networks can better meet a builder’s needs. dispersed.com/blog-posts/web3-compute-vs-web2-cloud-infrastructure

Why 3D Gaussian Splatting Belongs on a Decentralized GPU Network

This is a comprehensive crash course into 3D Gaussian splatting. It covers how this technique turns photos into navigable, photorealistic 3D scenes, then dives into how splat scene training is perfect for decentralized compute given the spiky, single-GPU job nature of the work. dispersed.com/blog-posts/3d-gaussian-splatting-on-decentralized-gpus

Batch Processing Images with Decentralized GPUs: A Practical Guide

This is a step-by-step guide to setting up batch jobs on Dispersed’s pay-per-execution model. For images, think: generation, upscaling, and transformation. Bitmap (from artist MHX) is highlighted as a working example of the batch job type in action, from containerizing a pipeline once to scheduling recurring runs that bill only for actual execution time. dispersed.com/blog-posts/batch-processing-images-decentralized-gpus

Dispersed Power Hour: Impressive Apps in Less than An Hour

On Wednesday, August 26th, Dispersed sponsored a 60-minute micro-hackathon called the Power Hour, held right before Let’s Vibe’s regular Denver AI meetup for low-code, no-code, and vibe coders.

The format was simple: everyone in the room had the chance to deploy something real on Dispersed in under an hour. After a short overview of what Dispersed is, participants had about 40 minutes to build something, choosing from pre-tested starter recipes like Ollama + Open WebUI, ComfyUI, or LightX2V, or doing their own thing.

The session closed with multiple fully formed apps, all done within the Dispersed Power Hour, including:

Pocket Pets: A Tamagotchi-inspired Phoenix LiveView app. Visitors scan a QR code, hatched a tiny virtual pet on their phone, then keep it alive by feeding it, playing with it, and putting it down for naps.

The core design is intentionally lightweight: there’s no database. Each pet lives inside the visitor’s LiveView websocket process, which makes the experience feel immediate and ephemeral. Close the tab, stop the node, or end the demo, and the pet is gone.

Night Shift: An LLM observability tool designed to batch and analyze AI interaction data. Dispersed runs heavy evaluation tasks across global nodes for faster, more affordable analysis compared to traditional continuous monitoring methods.

Johnny API: This AI cartoon band audition community-focused tool lets users create cartoon characters and audition for an AI band via prompting. It uses Stable Audio on the backend to facilitate communal music creation through “riffs” rather than full songs.

All builders received credits they could use to continue building on Dispersed after the event.

The Power Hour ran directly into Let’s Vibe’s regular bi-weekly meetup, giving builders a chance to demo what they’d just shipped to a larger room of builders.

Look out for more such events in the near future. Interested in building something now? Send us an email at compute@dispersed.com.

Render Network Product Updates: Video Generative Models Added + New Product Versions Now Live

In the News

Unchained’s Laura Shin Sits Down to Hear Render Network’s Origin Story

Render Network Foundation Board Member Trevor Harries-Jones sat across from Laura Shin for a Render Network 101. They talk about how it started, how decentralized GPU rendering works, what kinds of projects can be done on it (spoiler: almost anything and everything), and what’s next for the network.

They dive deep into the role of provenance, the network’s move from Ethereum to Solana, and how all of this culminates in enabling millions of everything creators in the very near future thanks to the surge in AI.

Watch the interview now:

Sunspark now in 45 Film Festivals

Sunspark, rendered entirely on Render Network, has now been accepted into 45 film festivals, 11 of them Oscar-qualifying!

Here’s an excerpt from the latest coverage of the film on The Line Drunk Podcast:

“Because I had the grant and the render speed was just very fast, I was able to render the whole film not just in HD but in 4K to kind of make it future-proof…”

“So being able to have just a render farm at my disposal for my own 11-minute project is pretty cool. The render bottleneck just goes away.”

We couldn’t have articulated better what Render Network enables. Congratulations to filmmaker Danny Bourque!

Artist Spotlight: Matteo Scappin, “Hyperdimensional Breach”

This clip is a compact demonstration of how far Gaussian splatting has moved beyond a novelty capture technique into a full creative pipeline. The scene is a real forest, captured and reconstructed as a splat, with a stylized organic “Vectron” character folded seamlessly into it.

The result is “Hyperdimensional Breach,” a showcase of how artists are combining emerging 3D capture workflows with scalable GPU rendering to explore new creative territory. It’s exactly the kind of experimentation Render Network is built to support.

What’s actually happening, layer by layer:

1. The splat foundation. The forest itself is a Gaussian splat reconstruction. It’s real-world geometry, lighting, and texture captured volumetrically rather than modeled by hand. It collapses the line between “filmed” and “built” environments, giving artists photoreal backdrops without traditional 3D modeling or texturing work.
2. Perfect camera tracking, for free. Because the splat is reconstructed from real camera footage, the original camera path comes along with it. That means any CG element inserted later, like the Vectron, inherits pixel-accurate camera motion automatically. This is the part that used to require painstaking match-move work in traditional VFX; here it’s a byproduct of the capture itself.
3. Volumetric integration, not compositing. Rather than pasting a CG character on top of a video (a 2D composite), the Vectron is placed inside the reconstructed 3D volume. It can be blocked off by trees, sit correctly in the depth of the scene, and move through it with real spatial logic. That’s possible because everything lives in the same 3D space.
4. Custom audio-reactive animation. The artist’s own procedural audio tool drives the Vectron’s movement and form. That means the animation isn’t keyframed by hand but generated from sound in a repeatable, tool-driven way. It showcases Scappin’s signature technique.
5. Distribution back to Render Network. The final output routes through Render Network, meaning the compute-heavy rendering isn’t gated behind expensive local hardware. Independent artists like Scappin can access rendering power that used to require studio infrastructure.

Why this matters to artists

Splatting alone is impressive. Splatting plus inherited camera tracking plus volumetric character integration plus custom procedural animation plus accessible distributed rendering is a genuinely new kind of pipeline. Gaussian splatting isn’t just a faster way to capture reality. It’s becoming a substrate that other creative tools (character design, procedural animation, audio-reactivity) can plug into natively.

Announcements

See you at Half Rez, September 11th!

One of our own plus a few friends of the network are descending on Chicago Friday, September 11th for the annual Half Rez event, a mini-conference/party for 3D artists, motion designers, and visual creators.

Attending? Tag us on socials!

The Foundation’s Sunny Osahn is Speaking at Conf3rence in Dortmund Sep 16th

Sunny Osahn, Ecosystem and Adoption Lead at Render Network Foundation, will speak on the “Agentic AI and the Battle for Compute Infrastructure” panel at Conf3rence in Dortmund, Germany, September 15–16th.

Stop by and chat with Sunny if you’re planning to attend.

Learn more about the conference: conf3rence.com

Render Network Founder, Jules Urbach, Will Speak at BlenderCon, Sep 23–25th

Jules Urbach, Render Network founder and OTOY CEO, will be speaking at the annual conference that brings Blender users together in Amsterdam.

OTOY, the leading ecosystem partner of Render Network, has a longstanding partnership with the Blender Foundation and continues to develop tools and resources for Blender users looking for scalable, on-demand, affordable rendering compute.

Check out this year’s conference details: conference.blender.org/2026

Render Network At Motion + Design NYC, September 26th

Spenser Dickerson, 3D artist, designer, and Product Marketing Manager at OTOY and Render Network power user, will present on behalf of Render Network at the Motion + Design, the largest motion design festival in the world, held in New York City on September 26th at the Roulette Intermedium Theater.

Spenser’s background spans motion design, visualization, photogrammetry, and emerging 3D technologies. He’ll showcase how Render Network is expanding what artists can create at scale, from production-grade rendering and real-world studio workflows to emerging technologies like Gaussian splats and next-generation spatial media.

Check out the announcement:

Want a free ticket to the conference? Find us on socials!

Opportunity to showcase your work on the 50-foot wall projection at Miami Art Week

Render Network Foundation is seeking artists to submit 2-minute pieces for a Miami Art week activation. Entries are being reviewed through this month.

Miami Art Week and Art Basel Miami converge this December and we’re lending our rendering compute power for an activation at The National Hotel, Miami Beach on December 2, 2026.

The projection will consist of 10–15 artist pieces completing a 20–30 minute loop, projected on a 50-foot outdoor surface.

This is a chance to have your work showcased in front of more than a thousand attendees.

Learn more and apply to have your work shown.

***Call for artists: Opportunity to showcase your work at Miami Art Week! More below.***

Ecosystem metrics

The Render Network Foundation tracks various metrics on its network. Below is the aggregate view of the month’s activity, previous month’s activity, and month-over-month change for a few key metrics. Note that we’re reporting new data for Dispersed. It is highlighted in yellow in the below charts.

Looking for definitions of each of these terms? Check out our previous monthly reports.

Product Updates

On Render Network, July saw multiple releases across the rendering stack, plus an early look at what’s next for Octane Standalone. Below is a summary:

Case Study: One Person, an Entire Film

This month we published a case study on Danny Bourque, the solo artist behind Sunspark, an 11-minute 3D-animated short film he wrote, directed, designed, modeled, animated, and scored entirely by himself — with rendering support from a Render Network Foundation grant.

Bourque made Sunspark entirely alone: no studio, no crew, no production company. His only outside support was a grant from the Render Network Foundation that made rendering the film in 4K possible. “I come from a filmmaking background, so I’m very aware of the level of competition present at larger film festivals,” Bourque said. “I knew the story, technical quality, and overall presentation had to be extremely high for Sunspark to have a chance at being selected.”

Without Render Network, Bourque estimates rendering the film on his own hardware would have taken months of nonstop work just to finish in standard HD — 4K wasn’t something he seriously considered as a possibility. The film’s most demanding scenes, dense junkyard piles of scavenged objects, often required rendering with VRAM set at 24GB.

Because rendering was no longer the bottleneck, he treated rendering as a non-issue rather than a constraint on his schedule. This increased freedom proved useful when a shading mistake meant the need to re-render shots already thought final, and essential when he decided to improve early sequences as his skills grew over the production’s two-year span. Individual shots rendered via Render Network took anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours; over 27,000 frames in total went through the network across nine and a half months.

Since its Oscar-qualifying premiere at the 2026 American Documentary and Animation Film Festival in Palm Springs, Sunspark has been accepted into more than 30 festivals and counting, six of them Oscar-qualifying. This is the level of recognition Bourque is competing for against films made by much larger crews.

Watch the trailer:

Sunspark Sees Widespread News Coverage

Sunspark’s Fantasia Festival 2026 premiere drew coverage across film and animation press:

Horror Clurb podcast — Fantasia Festival: Interview with Danny Bourque

Blockchain News — Solo Animator Leverages Render Network (RNDR) for 4K Film Achievement

Unseen Films — A review of Sunspark (2026) and an interview with director Danny Bourque

The Lena Ghio Paradox — “Sunspark”: A One-Robot Odyssey of Tenderness, Solitude, and the New Frontier of Animation

Mystic and Severe — Danny Bourque interviewed by Michael O’Keefe

Wasteland: Sunspark Interview — Danny Bourque Chats about His Award-Winning Short | Fantasia Fest

The Movies Podcast: Fantasia 2026 — Interview | SUNSPARK Director Danny Borque

Artist Spotlight

BRRD is an audio-visual project where music and 3D animation come together in a silly, character-led world built around two pink and blue robins known as BRRDs. Directed by NRRD, the project brings musicians, visual artists, and voice talent together to create daily synced animations, small stories, and DJ-driven visuals, all produced on Render Network.

BRRD shows up as videos, gallery pieces, and live audio-visual sets. It’s playful and collaborative. The intentionally simple visuals, focused more on rhythm, timing, and fun than perfection. The bigger goal is inclusion: BRRD is meant to be open to people from all corners of the internet, using shared creativity to raise money for aviaries, charities, and bird conservation groups.

Follow along: https://www.instagram.com/dailybrrd/

Announcements

Get your work showcased on a50-foot wall projection at Miami Art Week!

Render Network Foundation is seeking artists to submit 2-minute pieces for a Miami Art week activation.

Limited space opportunity for artists!

Imagine your work being shown to a crowd of over a thousand attendees during one of the world’s premiere art events. Render Network is sponsoring the rendering for an art activation at The National Hotel, Miami Beach on December 2, 2026.

A 20–30 minute reel of works will be projected on a 50-foot wall for the outdoor activation. The reel will be composed of pieces approximately 2 minutes long across 10–15 artists selected by Render Network.

If you’re interested in learning more about this opportunity, learn more and submit an application here.

One Person, an Entire Film

Danny Bourque made the short film Sunspark entirely alone. He wrote it, directed it, designed the characters, modeled and rigged them in Cinema 4D, animated all 150+ shots, recorded and mixed the sound, and composed the score. No studio, no crew, no production company. His only outside support was a grant from the Render Network Foundation that made rendering the film in 4K possible.

Before Sunspark, Bourque spent years producing short, looping cyberpunk animations: glowing neon wireframes, glitch effects, and robots. Many of these were used as video projections behind him during live performances under his electronic music alias, Glitch Black. Sunspark is a departure from that world in tone, but not entirely in spirit: it still centers on robots, and its visual language still leans on glowing blue light, this time in the form of electricity coursing through wires rather than neon signage.

The film’s premise is simple and human: while scavenging for spare parts in a post-human wasteland, a lonely robot discovers the broken body of another robot who desperately needs his help. After failing to fully revive her, he has to decide how much of himself he’s willing to give to bring her back to life.

Bourque came to the project with real festival experience. He’s got to his name a Regional Student Academy Award finalist credit, a Slamdance Anarchy Award win, and professional animation work on Hasbro’s Star Wars and G.I. Joe properties, plus freelance work for RUN Studios on projects for Amazon and Microsoft. That background made him acutely aware of what he was up against.

“I come from a filmmaking background, so I’m very aware of the level of competition present at larger film festivals,” Bourque said. “I knew the story, technical quality, and overall presentation had to be extremely high for Sunspark to have a chance at being selected.”

The Challenge: A Festival-Caliber Film on a One-Person Budget

Without Render Network, Bourque’s only option was rendering on his own personal computer, a process he estimates would have taken months of nonstop rendering just to finish the film in standard HD. A resolution of 4K wasn’t something he seriously considered as a possibility.

That constraint mattered because Sunspark’s ambitions were not modest. Over its 11-minute runtime, the film includes more than 150 individual shots, many of them dense with geometry.

The most demanding scenes by far were set in a junkyard, where cluttered piles of scavenged objects pushed rendering requirements hard. Of these shots Bourque said, “In retrospect, I probably should have simplified the geometry and lowered the texture resolution on the junk assets used to populate the junk piles. All these dense piles of objects in the background often required rendering with VRAM set at 24GB.”

From Idea to Premiere: A Two-and-a-Half-Year Solo Production

Sunspark’s path from concept to festival premiere ran nearly two years and seven months:

• Initial idea: August 14, 2023
• Writing & character design: ~1 month of active work, spread across August 2023 and February 2024
• Storyboarding: 5 months (August–September 2023, February–June 2024)
• Animating: 11 months (June 2024–April 2025)
• Sound recording, mixing & mastering: May 2025
• World premiere: March 29, 2026, at AmDocs (Oscar-qualifying)

By 2023, Bourque admits he was looking at nearly 10 years of not creating any new short films that lasted longer than a minute. However, he spent that decade getting better at 3D animation and music production. He decided to put to use what he’d learned into creating a new short film with what he deemed a “proper” story, animated in 3D.

Sunspark is about a robot bartering with flowers to buy and repair another, broken robot. For Bourque, the idea came to him almost fully formed. From there, he sketched the characters, storyboarded the script, modeled and rigged the robots in Cinema 4D, and built out each location, starting with the exterior of the main character’s house, then the junkyard, then the house interior.

Animating the film’s 150+ shots took nearly a year on its own. Bourque’s strategy included keeping up momentum to tackle the film shot by shot until it was finished. As a motivator, he set an early submission deadline for one of the film festivals he wanted to be included in as his completion deadline target.

When animation was nearly finished, Bourque shifted to music and sound. He drew on a decade of experience composing as Glitch Black to write the film’s main themes, and turning a closet lined with blankets and towels into a makeshift recording booth, where he banged and clanged kitchen appliances, tools, and other household objects to build most of the film’s sound effects library.

Since its Oscar-qualifying premiere at the 2026 American Documentary and Animation Film Festival in Palm Springs, Sunspark has been accepted into over 20 additional festivals and counting, five of them Oscar-qualifying. That’s a level of recognition Bourque was competing for against films made by much larger crews.

Rendering That Kept Up with a Two-Year Solo Schedule

Because he wasn’t waiting days for renders, Bourque was able to treat rendering as a non-issue rather than a constraint on his schedule. This mattered even more given that the film’s animation skills were visibly evolving over its two-year production.

“With the film taking nearly 2 years to complete, my animation skills improved between the first and final shots,” Bourque said. “Realizing this, I chose to go back and revise some of my earlier sequences to make them look even better. With the Render Foundation Grant, I didn’t need to think twice about re-rendering these early scenes.”

That flexibility also proved essential when things went wrong technically. At one point, Bourque discovered a mistake in his shading setup that wasn’t visible until shots were rendered at final quality.

Bourque used a noise texture in the Octane Node Editor without realizing it animated its noise pattern over time by default; all he needed was a noise pattern that wouldn’t change. However, he wasn’t able to notice the noise pattern changing until he rendered several shots in motion and in 4K. At that point, they were basically final quality shots. After noticing strange dancing textures, he realized he needed to re-render those shots over again. “With the Render Network, it was easy enough to fix my C4D project files and get new frames rendered quickly,” Bourque said.

Across the entire production, individual shots rendered via Render Network took anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours. That’s a dramatic shift from the months of nonstop rendering his own hardware would have required to finish the film in standard HD, let alone 4K.

A Film That Wouldn’t Have Existed Otherwise

For Bourque, the impact of Render Network was about speed, yes, but it also changed the creative ceiling of what a solo animator could realistically attempt.

In terms of real-world, render time ceased being a technical bottleneck with Render Network as part of Bourque’s workflow. Once a shot was ready to render, rendering happened quickly. That allowed Bourque to immediately move on to compositing and post effects. Having the ability to render shots nearly instantly across an entire 11-minute film resulted in substantial time savings without loss of production momentum.

That time savings is what made 4K possible in the first place. Bourque is direct about it: he would not have attempted a 4K finish if he’d had to render on his own hardware. Instead, over 27,000 frames — draft, final, and fix renders included — went through Render Network over roughly nine and a half months. The result? A fully solo-produced, festival-caliber short film that stands up next to work from much larger studios.

Removing Compute as a Constraint on Solo Ambition

Sunspark is, in one sense, a very small production: one person, one home setup, no studio backing. In another sense, it’s a full-scale festival film made up of 150+ shots, an original score, a custom sound library, and a 4K finish. A strong contender that in fact competed for and won a place at Oscar-qualifying festivals alongside films made by teams many times its size.

For solo creators and small teams working without studio infrastructure, that gap between ambition and available compute is often the real ceiling on what’s possible. Render Network’s role in Sunspark wasn’t to add a new capability so much as to remove a bottleneck that would have otherwise forced Bourque to scale down in resolution, in iteration, and in how much of the film he could afford to revise.

WATCH THE TRAILER:

Ecosystem metrics

The Render Network Foundation tracks various metrics on its network. Below is the aggregate view of the month’s activity, previous month’s activity, and month-over-month change for a few key metrics. We made slight changes to the table format.

Looking for definitions of each of these terms? Check out our previous monthly reports.

A Render Network Ecosystem Subnets Explainer

Every new subnet approved within the Render Network ecosystem expands what the network can do. But what does that actually mean?

A subnet is a dedicated network built for a specific type of compute workload, with its own hardware matching, job routing, and reward structure. Some Render ecosystem subnets may share a tech team or parts of the same tech stack for certain functions (like onchain rewards), but each one handles a distinct category of work and taps into its own pool of GPU operators.

Rendering subnet — the original Render Network, processing 3D jobs across engines like Blender, OctaneRender, and Cinema 4D. It’s been running for years and has processed millions of frames.

Dispersed — handles AI workloads, including inference, training, and generative pipelines, as well as general compute needs Launched in Q4 2025.

Salad Technologies — proposed in RNP_023 and approved by the community in April 2026 as an official Render ecosystem subnet, bringing the power of 60,000 GPUs onchain with rewards and payments denominated in RENDER and revenue driving burn once fully integrated.

Render Network started as infrastructure for 3D artists. Then came Dispersed for AI workloads. Now Salad Technologies is joining the fold. Each addition expands what the overarching Render ecosystem can deliver.

Product updates

C4D Wizard V1.07 is now live on Render Network

If you’re using Cinema 4D on Render Network, download the latest Wizard update: github.com/rendernetwork/c4d-plugin/releases/tag/v1.07

New OpenClaw and Pearl Mining Recipes added to Dispersed

On Dispersed, ​users can enjoy the flexibility of bare-metal rentals, or take advantage of the library of pre-built job recipes. These are preconfigured templates that bundle validated hardware requirements and container settings, letting a consumer launch a common workload with minimal input, sometimes just an SSH key.

Users not only have access to preconfigured recipes but can also fork them or build their own recipe templates.

Recipes are built for any workload that runs more than once: they relaunch without resubmitting a full configuration, support fast iteration, and can be forked into customized versions with different hardware, images, or pre-filled inputs. This is perfect for users who find themselves resubmitting the similar payload again and again. Available recipes on Dispersed include:

• Base — Linux environments with SSH access, such as Ubuntu or Debian
• Inference — generative-AI environments such as ComfyUI, PyTorch, or OpenClaw
• Training — fine-tuning and reinforcement learning environments such as Unsloth or Jupyter
• Specialized recipes for emerging GPU-native workloads, including Pearl mining

In June we added OpenClaw and Pearl Mining recipes to the library, giving consumers ready-made templates for these workloads on Dispersed without needing to configure hardware and container settings from scratch.

Did you know Dispersed users can access GPUs on the network via API?

For workloads that don’t fit a recipe, for instance one-off jobs or projects that require full control, users can access compute from the Dispersed network of GPUs directly through the API, specifying exact hardware and a custom Docker image.

In the News

IT Brew on how the global memory shortage is upending IT budgets and plans

IT Brew, a newsletter for business tech professionals, dove into how IT professionals charged with sourcing compute, are working around GPU supply bottlenecks. Per the article, flexibility is key: working with multiple OEMs, planning procurement months ahead, and being more efficient with existing resources.

On the ways in which the market could be even more flexible, Trevor Harries-Jones, Render Network Foundation board member, was quoted in the article:

“What this moment really highlights is whether unused compute capacity (which already exists) can be harnessed and shifted toward shared and distributed compute models,” he said. “As AI demand continues growing, I think the conversation will increasingly move from ‘How do we buy more hardware?’ to ‘How do we better utilize the compute that already exists?’”

https://www.itbrew.com/stories/global-memory-shortage-ram-scalping

Artist Spotlight — Custom RN API Widgets: Job Tracking, Reimagined

This month, one of our artists took render monitoring into their own hands, building a custom widget suite on top of the Render Network API.

The result: a sleek, always-on job tracker that docks above any DCC, styled with a bold red-on-black theme and packed with the details that matter — job name, status, frame progress, engine, tier, samples, and render time — all visible at a glance.

What makes it more than eye candy is the direct API and download manager integration. You can pause or cancel jobs, flip between job previews, pop open full-res frames, or jump to specific frames. And you don’t have to leave the widget. Since it’s built to stay lightweight, only the essentials are exposed by default; the full manager app is always one click away for deeper control.

The widget is dockable, resizable, and opacity-adjustable, so it can sit quietly in a corner while you keep working. Live updates are included, no alt-tabbing required.

Announcements

Road to Integration With Salad — X Spaces Recap

We ran our first X Spaces on the Road to Integration, featuring Salad Technologies, with CEO Bob Miles and CTO Kyle Dodson. The full transcript and recap are available. Here are a few highlights:

• Salad announced they had quietly shipped RENDER payments for customers. Chef rewards in RENDER are currently in testing and expected to go live within weeks.
• A theme that came up repeatedly: agentic AI is breaking legacy payment rails. Agents consume tokens at a scale humans never could, and they can’t open a bank account, complete KYC, or get a credit card. As Bob put it during the Spaces, “millions, tens of millions, billions of these agents interacting online” will need to transact — and that’s exactly the gap RENDER-based payments are built to fill.

RNP-023 milestone update:

• Completed: RENDER payments — shipped
• In progress: Chef rewards in RENDER (testing)
• Coming soon: Full subnet integration — Salad will share more details soon

Check out the full transcript and recording here:

https://rendernetwork.medium.com/render-network-x-salad-technologies-road-to-integration-part-1-ef7c35da9b71

STURDY. Case Study on Creative Freedom

This month we published a case study on STURDY., the multidisciplinary creative house behind visuals for artists including Bad Bunny, Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Travis Scott, and Peso Pluma. For the 2025 Latin Grammys, STURDY. was tasked with directing, designing, and producing the visual content for Rauw Alejandro’s performance on a production timeline of less than two weeks.

The outcome was a rich, colorful and broadcast-ready visual experience backing a four-song medley for one of the most engaging musical performers of his generation.

By distributing the workload across Render Network, STURDY. completed the entire final render in less than 24 hours, at a cost 60–70% lower than traditional cloud rendering.

For STURDY., just as important as speed was creative freedom. Because rendering was no longer the bottleneck thanks to Render Network, the team kept the long, cinematic one-shot sequences they’d originally envisioned rather than breaking up the scenes to manage render load on local hardware. It also gave them room to fix last-minute issues fast: the final deliverable was uploaded to the venue about an hour before Rauw Alejandro’s rehearsal.

Read the full case study here:

https://rendernetwork.medium.com/how-sturdy-delivered-10-days-of-rendering-in-less-than-24-hours-for-the-latin-grammys-f075b33f89ea

Project at a Glance

Bringing a Cinematic Performance to One of Music’s Biggest Stages

STURDY. is a multidisciplinary creative house that has built a reputation for creating visuals that audiences remember long after the performance ends. They deliver creative direction, stage design, visual content, and immersive experiences for some of the world’s biggest artists and brands, including Bad Bunny, Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Travis Scott, Linkin Park, Peso Pluma, Adobe, and Formula 1.

When Puerto Rican singer, songwriter, and dancer Rauw Alejandro was invited to perform at the 2025 Latin Grammys following the release of his album Cosa Nuestra, STURDY. was tasked with directing and designing the performance as well as producing the visual content that would accompany it.

Watch the performance here:

The challenge wasn’t simply creating compelling visuals. It was creating them against a deadline that left almost no room for error. To put it into perspective: Production began on November 1. Show day was November 13. That is less than 2 full weeks.

In that compressed timeframe, the team needed to concept, design, animate, render, composite, review, revise, and deliver a broadcast-ready visual experience for one of the most watched events in Latin music.

The full, 5 minute set from STURDY. can be viewed here:

Why Live Production Leaves No Room for Rendering Delays

Unlike film or episodic content, live entertainment rarely follows a predictable production schedule.

Creative ideas evolve constantly and technical requirements change. Simultaneously, new opportunities emerge constantly while last-minute adjustments are often unavoidable.

For studios working in live production, rendering can quickly become the biggest constraint on creativity.

“Balancing high fidelity with render times is a persistent pressure,” said

Jasper Heenan, Head of Content at STURDY. team. “Without a fast rendering solution, timelines become much more rigid, which often doesn’t suit the nature of live productions.”

Historically, rendering workflows relied on local workstations or private cloud render farms. What many creative studios have found is that local rendering limits scale. The alternative is traditional cloud render farms. However this option often introduces significant costs, particularly when projects require multiple rounds of revisions.

For a project as complex as designing both the performance and the visual content accompanying it for the artist that Rolling Stone has declared “Latin music’s greatest showman,” either option would have forced difficult compromises.

Creating a Four-Song Visual Narrative for the Latin Grammys

STURDY.’s primary production pipeline combines Cinema 4D, Houdini, and Octane Render, with Adobe After Effects serving as a key tool for compositing, editing, and animation.

The studio’s creative process always starts with collaboration. The team works closely with artists to understand not only what they want audiences to see, but what they want them to feel. From there, creative development expands across stage design, lighting design, camera direction, animation, and visual storytelling.

Once concepts are approved, production begins with animatics and blockouts before moving into lighting, shading, simulation work, rendering, compositing, and final delivery.

For the Latin Grammys performance, the final content was built around a four-song medley that would ultimately be assembled from four to five major visual sequences. Those sequences were anything but lightweight.

Below is a behind-the-scenes break down showing how the storm session in the experience was put together:

Scenes featured hundreds of individually framed pieces of geometry designed to create the appearance of theatrical stage flats. The project generated scene files ranging from 150 MB to 1.2 GB before textures and simulation caches were included. The working project folder on a single artist’s workstation reached approximately 60 GB, while total storage requirements for the project are estimated at between 3 and 5 TB.

Five artists contributed across digital painting, 3D modeling, animation, and CG production.

The final media package delivered to the venue exceeded 100 GB. Below are captures of the different scene styles across the full sequence.

When a Ten-Day Render Timeline Meets a Twelve-Day Production Schedule

Rauw Alejandro’s performance for the Latin Grammys lasted just under five minutes. Rendering it, however, was another story.

Including preview renders, revisions, fixes, and final outputs, the project generated approximately 22,096 frames at roughly 6000 × 2000 resolution.

Render times varied significantly depending on scene complexity, ranging from approximately 30 seconds to three minutes per frame on STURDY.’s local hardware, which included systems ranging from single NVIDIA 3090 workstations to dual 5090 machines.

Based on those averages, rendering the final content locally would have required between 150 and 225 hours of rendering time. That’s nearly ten full days.

The problem was obvious. The entire production schedule was only slightly longer than ten days. Without access to additional compute resources, rendering alone would have consumed nearly the entire project timeline.

From Ten Days to Less Than Twenty-Four Hours

To overcome those constraints, STURDY. leveraged Render Network’s decentralized GPU rendering network.

Rather than relying solely on local hardware, the team distributed rendering workloads across Render Network’s global network of GPU providers. The impact was dramatic. While final-resolution rendering would have taken approximately ten days locally, the entire final render workload was completed on Render Network in less than 24 hours.

One sequence from the project provides a useful illustration: A render submission consisting of 1,471 frames would have required roughly 12 hours to complete on a local workstation under ideal conditions. Using Render Network, the same sequence finished in approximately 40 to 50 minutes.

For STURDY., the difference wasn’t incremental. It fundamentally changed what was possible within the project’s timeline. To achieve similar throughput internally, the studio estimates it would have required between 50 and 100 additional workstations.

Below is a segment showing how the the sequence for the song Carita Linda came together:

Keeping Long Cinematic Sequences Instead of Compromising for Speed

The greatest benefit wasn’t simply speed. It was creative freedom. One of the team’s original goals was to maintain long, cinematic one-shot sequences throughout the performance. In live production, those types of sequences are often shortened or broken apart because rendering requirements become too demanding.

Studios frequently rely on looping elements and segmented visuals to reduce rendering workloads and minimize risk. For this project, STURDY. didn’t have to make those compromises.

“Frequently we have to carefully plan how we execute longer sequences because we simply don’t have the time or power to render them,” explains Heenan. “We didn’t have to do that with this project, which gave us a lot more freedom in storytelling.”

Because rendering capacity was no longer the primary constraint, the team was able to focus on delivering the strongest creative experience rather than designing around technical limitations.

What Are the Biggest Challenges of Complex Creative Projects?

The biggest challenges creative studios face aren’t creative revisions. What often threatens delivery schedules is the smallest mistakes. Throughout production, STURDY.’s scenes were built from hundreds of animated geometry elements. During review, occasional issues would appear such as an object that failed to leave frame correctly during a transition, a misplaced element, or a rendering artifact that wasn’t visible until final output.

The fixes themselves were often straightforward. The challenge was rerendering. On a local workstation, correcting even a small issue could mean waiting hours for updated renders at final resolution. Those delays compound quickly when deadlines are measured in days or hours.

With Render Network, the team could make adjustments, resend the render job, and receive updated frames fast enough to keep production moving.

That flexibility proved especially valuable as the deadline approached. The final deliverable was uploaded to the venue approximately one hour before Rauw Alejandro was scheduled to begin rehearsal. In live entertainment, that kind of timeline is not unusual.

Having access to scalable rendering capacity can be the difference between scrambling to make compromises and delivering exactly what was envisioned.

The Need for Scalable Compute as Visual Ambition Grows

As audiences expect increasingly immersive live experiences, STURDY. believes rendering infrastructure will play an even larger role in creative production.

The studio sees a future where live visuals feel more integrated with physical environments, creating experiences that blur the line between digital content and reality.

While real-time technologies continue to evolve, offline rendering remains essential for achieving the level of fidelity, polish, and compositing control required by many large-scale productions.

Distributed rendering helps bridge the gap. Instead of waiting days to see the next iteration, artists can receive feedback in hours while maintaining the visual quality that audiences have come to expect.

At the same time, growing demand for GPU resources across AI, content creation, and other industries is making hardware increasingly expensive and difficult to access. For creative teams, that makes scalable rendering networks even more valuable.

How Decentralized Rendering Becomes a Competitive Advantage for Creative Teams

For STURDY., Render Network delivered more than faster renders. It reduced production risk and preserved creative flexibility. It also transformed what would have been nearly ten days of rendering into less than twenty-four hours.

On a project that moved from kickoff to live performance in less than two weeks, that difference mattered. Most importantly, it allowed the team to focus on what they do best: creating memorable experiences for artists and audiences.

As creative expectations continue to rise and production timelines continue to shrink, access to scalable GPU rendering is becoming more than a technical convenience. It’s becoming a competitive advantage.

Participants:

Silvia Lacayo — Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation
Tristan Relly — Head of Operations, Render Network Foundation
Trevor Harries-Jones — Board Member, Render Network Foundation
Sunny Osahn — Ecosystem Lead, Render Network Foundation
Bob Miles — Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies
Kyle Dodson — CTO, Salad Technologies

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

The Road to Integration refers to the recently passed RNP-023 governance proposal that brings Render Network to Salad as their onchain payments layer. Real quickly, I’m Silvia Lacayo, Head of Marketing and Communications at Render Network Foundation. We’ve got the Salad team here, the Render Network team too.

We will be talking about the integration roadmap at a high level, and why we’re excited about what we’re building together. If you have been following along, you’ve probably seen some integration announcements already.

Today, we’re gonna go a little deeper into the details, but we’re also gonna zoom out and talk about the broader compute landscape — from AI demand, GPU shortages, why distributed compute networks are having a bit of a moment now, and more.

Feel free to drop your questions in the comments. Sunny and I will be checking those periodically. Sunny, do you want to say hi for anyone who just joined?

Sunny Osahn Ecosystem Lead, Render Network Foundation

Everybody, how is it going? I am Sunny from the Render Network Foundation. Some of you may be familiar with my voice from other spaces that we have held. I look after our grants program here at the foundation. So if you’re a 3D artist or somebody looking for GPU compute power, definitely get in touch.

And anybody listening to this on the replay, you are also more than welcome to leave some comments or questions or DM. We will absolutely get back to you as well.

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

All right. So with that, let’s get everybody else introduced and then we’ll jump right in. Let’s start with Bob Miles on the Salad team and we’re going to work our way around from there. Bob?

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

Thanks Silvia. Yep, this is Bob here. I’m the founder and CEO of Salad and this is actually my first X-Space. So I’m very excited to be here and cover all of those topics.

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

Excellent. Kyle, are you able to do a quick intro?

Kyle Dodson CTO, Salad Technologies

Yes, hello. I’m Kyle Dodson. I’m the CTO at Salad. And also, first time here on an X-Space, but very excited to keep this conversation going. I know I got to meet several people when we were discussing RNP-023 and excited to give some updates.

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

Excellent. Yeah, it was really good to meet you in person. It’s the benefit of in real life events like RenderCon. All right, let’s move on to Tristan Relly. Do you want to do a quick intro?

[Note: Tristan Relly’s intro audio was cut off. Silvia then introduces Trevor Harris Jones.]

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

Trevor Harris-Jones is a board member of Render Network Foundation. We can let him do a bit of a deeper dive when we get started with the first question. Let’s just dive right in.

— RNP-023 & Onchain Payments —

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

This is for you, Bob. So RNP-023 is all about bringing Render Network through the Render token as an onchain payments layer for Salad. Why don’t you give us a little bit of a background — why it’s important to move towards an onchain payments system and reward system instead of launching a standalone token?

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

Yeah, so we’ve been operating a distributed cloud for eight years now. And one of the main points of friction that we’ve really come to feel in our business operations is payment processes — legacy payment processes, centralized web2 payment processes that exist today. That’s the tooling that runs our infrastructure, runs all the transactions under the hood.

We have thousands of nodes, tens of thousands of nodes that are distributed across 180 different countries across the globe. And equally on the other side of our marketplace, we have hundreds of customers that also come from all corners of the globe. It was about this time last year that we hit a scale where we really started to recognize the friction and the pain that comes with running across a global footprint.

Just to anchor this in an example: we use Stripe today to collect a lot of payments for our customers. Obviously the internet is full of fraudsters trying to get free services. Using Stripe, there is tooling called Radar to help take against that. But what we found is that tooling is inadequate, it’s a very blunt instrument, it leads to a lot of false positives. That’s a lot of lost revenue for us and for our suppliers. And it was mid last year, we hit the scale where we really started to recognize that this is an issue for the business as we continue to scale. That’s when Kyle and I really started to look to crypto payments as a solution to this problem.

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

We dove in pretty deep. We came to learn on that journey that there’s a lot more potential than simply payments. But it was certainly the first problem that brought us to crypto payments. In the RNP, there are three milestones. The first two relate to Render payouts for our providers — we call them chefs — and RENDER payments for our customers. We quietly shipped crypto and RENDER payments a few weeks ago. And already we’ve come to learn that a lot of those points of friction are solved through onchain crypto payments.

We’ve seen already a handful of people pay for our compute services in RENDER, so we’re really excited about where this goes, really excited to give you an update on our progress, and we’re really starting to see the benefits of accepting these payments, alongside the legacy rails that we have today.

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

Well folks, you heard it here first — they’ve already shipped a payments option — which is always great to get this kind of insight, and I don’t want to say alpha because that’s such a loaded word, but basically yes — you have now heard some of the progress the team here is making.

Bob, before I move on to the rest of the team, can I ask you to tell us a little bit about what drove the inflection point in the last year that you mentioned, and I guess we can all say AI and compute jobs, but that feels a little broad; maybe give us some color about what was driving that for you guys?

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

Yeah, I’ll shorten the timeframe there and really say the last month. It’s obviously been growing over the past year, and years now, as AI proliferates. We’ve all seen it in the public stock market with AI stocks and earnings report and just the massive build out that’s going into supply to support AI and the amount of tokens that there is demand for.

The inflection point that we really noticed was the release of OpenClaw late last year — that ushered in this new era of agentic AI, which is a very different profile in terms of how tokens are consumed, certainly how many tokens are consumed, it’s an order of magnitude more than a human who is limited by the input and output by typing or speaking to a chatbot. An agent can spawn out so many more requests and consume so many more tokens for accomplishing either the same task or a much greater task.

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

We’ve all seen the AI budget blowouts in the headlines the past couple of months. Large organizations like Uber went through their annual AI budget in a matter of months. That has forced a lot of these enterprise businesses to reconsider that spend and start to think through what is a more efficient way of embracing AI without breaking the budget.

It’s really only the last couple of months where we have seen demand absolutely sky rocket for our profile compute — smaller GPUs constrained by VRAM on those consumer GPUs that limits the model size which can run — we don’t support SOTA state of the art models which have tens of billions, hundreds of trillions parameters. It’s really only the past few months that people have started to have that sticker shock from the cost of running AI on SOTA models, and they’ve started to look for alternatives — how can you route certain workloads, particularly agentic tasks, to smaller purpose-built models that are equally capable of publishing the same task or delivering the same output — that trend really accelerated the last couple of months.

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

The last month for us, we’ve been in a condition we’ve never been in before where demand has outstripped the amount of supply that we have on our network. This profile of demand is really something that can only be met by what is an enormous pool of compute resources — internet connected devices that are idle. It really takes that distributed model to bring that supply online so that it can meet the growing demand.

Trevor Harries-Jones Board Member, Render Network Foundation

Hi Silvia. Hi everybody. Apologies, I got caught by the spaces glitch there, but it looks like I’m back up and running. I’m a huge fan of the Salad team and actually love this topic. So really excited to be jumping in here today.

— Render Network’s Strategic Perspective —

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

Let’s hear from Tristan Relly — can you share the perspective from the Render side of the equation? Why was Salad strategically important to the Render Network ecosystem at this time?

Tristan Relly Head of Operations, Render Network Foundation

Absolutely. Thanks. And Bob, that was a fantastic overview. So yeah, from a Render perspective, Bob and his team reached out to us as an effort to solve the problems around payments that Bob was talking about. From a Render perspective, it works well strategically for a few reasons.

Render, when one really drills down at its essence, is an infrastructure layer for a decentralized economy. There are subnets that use the Render infrastructure — and that’s what is really at play here for Salad. Where Salad works well for Render is that they’re also a decentralized GPU network, they have established, proven paying customers and usage from Salad’s marketplace. So once the integration into the Render ecosystem is complete, that will drive immediate onchain activity.

And once fully integrated, will include Render burns and increase token utility, particularly around the payments and rewards side.

Tristan Relly Head of Operations, Render Network Foundation

There are some other aspects that we also like about Salad. They’re a product-led team, and they’re operating as a front runner in the emerging GPU space — testing agentic use cases, running them on their own GPUs, really dog-feeding their own ideas. That alongside an active revenue growth plan with a strong customer pipeline are all good signals. And Salad doesn’t have its own native token, so there’s no competing back-end infrastructure that softens the overlap. We think there is a really meaningful synergy here that works well for both Salad and Render.

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

Yep, totally agree. Actually, I want to get Kyle in here to give us a perspective on the product side. But right before that — Trevor, anything to add here that Tristan Relly hasn’t touched on?

Trevor Harries-Jones Board Member, Render Network Foundation

Yeah, sure. Thanks. Well, a couple of things. To me, the deal was very much about scale — bringing exponentially more nodes to the network overall and more revenue was definitely enticing. I really view this deal as almost the compute client’s version two. We went through trying a different format with some other partners.

What stands out here to me, I agree with Tristan Relly on the competing token — but above and beyond that, I think the community did a great job structuring this around onchain revenue as a KPI. And I think that is a great innovation and a good structure to put us in as we look out towards potentially other subnets and partners.

— Product & Technical Perspective —

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

All right, I actually want to dive into onchain payments a bit more. Kyle, if you have the opportunity, walk us through from a product or technology perspective — what is this promising to unlock for you guys? And it’s totally fine to be honest about what challenges you’re foreseeing as you onboard onchain rails.

Kyle Dodson CTO, Salad Technologies

Yeah, the promise of what it brings really goes back to where this conversation started — looking at where this space was going, and today it’s pretty clear everybody can see it, right? This explosion of agentic workloads, and the legacy payment systems just don’t work. They don’t really scale. They push people into business models and workflows that lead to other problems downstream.

Render has built existing infrastructure — it’s accelerated for us, right? That exists, this community exists. It’s something that now we can build on top of and integrate with — that ecosystem is already there. So bringing that in now allows us to facilitate these use cases that really just haven’t made sense and aren’t working as they’ve been scaling.

Kyle Dodson CTO, Salad Technologies

We have a lot of customers coming from web2 backgrounds. It’s really now about bringing this bridge where web2 customers can come in and continue to use this distributed infrastructure layer onchain as we integrate and build this out on top of the Render Network’s infrastructure. The challenge is getting all those dots aligned with the rapid pace at which tools, agents, and infrastructure are being built.

Kyle Dodson CTO, Salad Technologies

Having the APIs, the onchain data, and really being able to see and drive this forward — I anticipate it will help Salad, but also more broadly speaking, the Render Network, as far as demonstrating that these distributed decentralized systems are scalable, they work, and they are handling actual enterprise jobs.

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

The other day I was trying to explain how I send and receive payments onchain to some folks who had never tried it themselves. For them it wasn’t necessarily clicking. So there are sort of apps or layers on top of the existing rails, but underneath it, there’s a lot of inefficiencies. Kyle, could you paint a picture for the audience as to what some of those inefficiencies are?

Kyle Dodson CTO, Salad Technologies

Yes. A lot of legacy payment solutions take a lot of time — sometimes weeks for settlement for various transactions. When you have a customer who’s ready to scale up, it gets into the weeds of business processes. All of these providers — our chefs — distributed machines running all over the world — those providers get paid for operating that. We can get stuck waiting on the speed of traditional institutions just being able to send and reconcile transactions, which with Render Network’s infrastructure obviously doesn’t exist — it happens so fast that we can get to a state of being productive quickly.

Kyle Dodson CTO, Salad Technologies

Fees are also a huge factor. In traditional payment rails, fees scale quickly. When you pay by credit card, vendors are just marking up their services to account for these additional fees that intermediaries are taking. Being able to bring those fees down is hugely impactful.

With agentic use cases specifically, it pushes companies into models where people need to do very large bulk purchases of credits just to work around that — more capital locked up just to work around legacy rail problems.

Kyle Dodson CTO, Salad Technologies

It’s not just on the customer side. We also have the providers — the chefs. Similar types of issues exist. Providers earn rewards and they’re looking for rewards that are valuable and easily convertible to other forms of value. Render is plugged into infrastructure that provides various opportunities for the providers. We’ve had a lot of providers ask us in the past — they’re really interested in holding tokens, participating in the economies that exist there. This gives us that door into that.

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

You mentioned in your question there, you were chatting to a couple of friends and this friction is not something we really experience in the developed world. But if you take that same pain point and apply it to agents — a wave that we see forming is: how do agents go and pay for different services? In our case, GPU compute cycles. They can’t go and KYC with a bank and get a credit card themselves. And all of that friction that Kyle just described is not compatible with an agentic world where you have ‘millions, tens of millions, billions of these agents interacting online.’ You really need a different payment rail — Render, Solana, or something like that — to facilitate a lot of these smaller rapid transactions.

— What Changes for Node Operators / Chefs —

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

Can you walk us through specifically what changes for Node Operators?

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

Yes, so there are three milestones as part of this RNP. Milestone one and two — that’s Render payouts for chefs, and Render payments for customers. Those are relatively trivial. As I mentioned, payments has already shipped. Chef Render rewards is built, it’s just in testing, so we’re measuring that in weeks until that goes live.

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

We want to publish our integration plans — the how we go and accomplish that — in the coming weeks. While the cost of making any changes is low, before we go and pick up the tools and start building this, it’s a very big integration. We can get feedback from the Render community and also from our chefs.

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

When RNP was approved a couple of months ago, we did hear from our chefs — those are our compute suppliers. They did have concerns. A lot of these are gamers — they are not even crypto adjacent, they are in a different world altogether, and they’re used to very stable earnings from their compute resources. We have to really think about how do we preserve that experience with them whilst delivering on what’s required in that RNP.

We’ve got some really compelling ideas around how we scratch that itch for our chefs. Many of them really are so far from the crypto space they’re not even aware of the benefits that can come here.

— Macro Opportunity & Compute Landscape —

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

Tristan, I wanted to engage with you on the opportunity at a macro level. What can this unlock for other industries, and why is compute particularly interesting for the segment we’re in?

Tristan Relly Head of Operations, Render Network Foundation

Yeah, super interesting. The opportunity is very broad. It starts off with any compute load that could be run in a containerized environment. And as these use cases evolve — which is happening fairly quickly — the use cases shift. For example, if we went back 12 months, the idea of using a distributed network for AI model training really didn’t make any sense. But fast forward 12 months and we’ve actually built a pilot for training a Gaussian splat model — it demonstrates that training can work in a distributed environment.

Tristan Relly Head of Operations, Render Network Foundation

Another filter: what are the jobs that don’t require extreme machine-to-machine speed and can operate with a few milliseconds of additional latency? AI inference fits that bill. And then: not everybody wants their data fed into one of the larger AI businesses for privacy reasons, and they want to run their own model. The decentralized environment allows you to access compute and set up your own model and run your inference inside an environment you control with your own encryption.

Tristan Relly Head of Operations, Render Network Foundation

From there it expands to potentially a Cambrian explosion of opportunities. You could set up an app store that draws compute from decentralized networks and allows people to access bespoke models that make usage more accessible. There are also very interesting use cases around breaking up workloads for high-security industries — for example, the banking industry has financial information it wouldn’t want to run on a decentralized network, but it also has to process large volumes of publicly available information around rules and regulations in different jurisdictions. Those workloads can be done on a distributed network.

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

You saying that right now, Tristan, reminds me of exactly a year ago. We were at Permissionless in New York City and Trevor was talking about a brand new study that had just come out about how it actually is possible to train models on decentralized networks.

Fast forward 12 months, Trevor — do you think that the capabilities possible on decentralized networks, coupled with onchain payments as the layer that reduces friction, is gaining traction?

Trevor Harries-Jones Board Member, Render Network Foundation

Well, I think there’s definitely compute traction as a whole first. The growth that you’ve seen on state-of-the-art providers — Anthropic’s growth, OpenAI’s growth — is absolutely staggering. But when you dig a little bit deeper, one of the really interesting stats: 60% of OpenRouter’s traffic had moved from more traditional US providers to open-weight, lower-cost Chinese models. And when you look at the makeup of those models, in many ways they’ve taken those papers we were talking about a year ago and have built on them, doing some amazing things in terms of making them possible to run on consumer hardware.

Trevor Harries-Jones Board Member, Render Network Foundation

People realize that you don’t need to use the state-of-the-art model for every calculation. In fact, for the vast majority of calculations, a cheaper model that can run on a decentralized node may be a better choice. Where I see the industry as a whole now is really needing to open up and educate around those aspects — and you’re seeing it emerge as agents come to the fore. The great thing from the crypto perspective is that a lot of that focus has been on the crypto-agentic intersection, which I think is really exciting and quite important.

— Crypto Natives? The Salad Team’s Journey —

Silvia Lacayo Head of Marketing & Communications, Render Network Foundation

Bob and Kyle, were you guys crypto natives before we started talking?

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

I certainly followed the space, but a lot of this is very new to me. It was really that moment a year ago where we did an audit of friction for our customers, and our legacy payment rails really stuck out. That’s when we started exploring other options and diving more deeply into the space. I won’t speak for Kyle, but I wouldn’t call him a crypto native yet.

Kyle Dodson CTO, Salad Technologies

Yes, that’s a fair way I think to describe where I’m at on that curve — not a crypto native yet. When I joined Salad, we started really in that heyday of mining — and that came with, when Bob founded the company, the start of seeing that there was this explosive demand for computational power that was going to outstrip supply. It’s been a long bet, but it keeps showing and it keeps coming up.

Kyle Dodson CTO, Salad Technologies

We started working with the Golem Network team, kind of testing some of these ideas and thinking about where things go. And really for me, that was the very eye-opening experience of diving deep and really seeing these things that I had learned and knowledge accumulated over the past several years, but now really thinking forward to all those challenges I was talking about before. Things didn’t pan out the way we wanted with Golem Network, but chatting with the Render Foundation — it just makes so much sense. I am moving on my way towards crypto native.

— Q&A — Audience Questions —

Sunny Osahn Ecosystem Lead, Render Network Foundation

Thank you so much for sharing that perspective, Kyle. Let’s see if we’ve got any questions from the audience. We do have one question from Jay — a longtime supporter of the Render Network. His question: ‘Where do you see overlaps and where do you see competition between Salad and Dispersed? I understand that they are two different providers, but if both use the same rails — i.e. Render — which provider should an operator join, and will the reward level ultimately be the deciding factor?’

Trevor Harries-Jones Board Member, Render Network Foundation

Jay, lots in that. I think yes, there are two services in Dispersed and Salad offering similar compute offerings. But when I think about their acquisition strategies, most of it is very much inbound — they’re not necessarily targeting a similar group of customers with overlapping sales teams. So I haven’t seen a ton of inbound overlap.

But when we think about the node side, one of the areas that really excited me about having these subnets was the ability for spillover. We were hearing from Salad that they’ve shifted from a challenge of finding enough revenue to finding enough nodes. In that circumstance, it would be great to have Dispersed really be the overflow for those nodes if they can’t source them themselves, and vice versa on elastic type jobs. So I’d hope to see deeper and deeper integration between the various subnets as time goes by.

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

Yeah, it’s actually a conversation we’ve had recently with others at Render — how do we think about this overflow capacity? We’re very focused on the RNP at the moment, but I can see us walking towards a future where that actually works to favor both Dispersed and Salad. There’s a slightly different offering in terms of the target persona on the supply side. But I definitely see those synergies that you described, Trevor.

Sunny Osahn Ecosystem Lead, Render Network Foundation

Thank you, Trevor and Bob, for the answer. Jay, I hope that kind of answered your question. I think to finish things up, we are going to finish off with a lightning round.

— Lightning Round — Exciting Use Cases —

Sunny Osahn Ecosystem Lead, Render Network Foundation

What is it that you are excited for in terms of use cases? Let’s go with Bob first.

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

Distributed training. It’s definitely in the research category right now, but it is starting to get a lot of traction. We have a customer in that space. We’re very excited about the demand that we can bring beyond just inference.

Trevor Harries-Jones Board Member, Render Network Foundation

I’m really excited that we’re moving splat training onto decentralized nodes. What we see in the current year is really the convergence of AI creation and traditional creation. Splats are such an important part of that — they’re a format that allow you to move seamlessly back and forth between them. It’s even a central piece on Apple Maps. Very excited that training aspect is something we can do on decentralized GPUs.

Tristan Relly Head of Operations, Render Network Foundation

Yeah, I think I mentioned it earlier — the decentralized training, just because it’s the frontier of what could be done here, is a real draw. It’s really cool to look at the case studies that were presented at RenderCon — for example, live risk tracking for satellite insurance. And there are really interesting use cases around breaking up workloads for high-security industries.

Kyle Dodson CTO, Salad Technologies

Yes, one use case that I get very excited about on a personal level is actually drug discovery and simulation — medicine, human health. The idea of how we can accelerate finding cures and solutions to diseases. The timelines to actually test and demonstrate efficacy are being condensed. The change of pace and the progression we’re seeing there is a space that just gets me really, really excited.

Sunny Osahn Ecosystem Lead, Render Network Foundation

I think if that were ever going to be a network in itself, it should be called the Mycelium Network. I’m going to hand over to Silvia.

— Closing —

Sunny Osahn Ecosystem Lead, Render Network Foundation

Thank you, Sunny. And I couldn’t agree more with Kyle. In fact, one of the case studies we saw on Dispersed had to do with improving replicability of scientific studies using compute. In some ways, nothing is more important than our health. So I think that’s a great place to wrap things up.

Huge thanks to everyone from the Salad team, the Render Network team, and everybody who tuned in. This was the first stop on the Road to Integration and we’ve got plenty more to share in the weeks and months ahead. If you’re not already doing so, make sure to follow both Render Network and Salad on various channels — X, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. — for future updates. We appreciate you being here and will see you at the next one.

Bob Miles Founder & CEO, Salad Technologies

Thank you everyone. Take care now.

Render Network x Salad Technologies: Road to Integration (Part 1) was originally published in Render Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ecosystem metrics

The Render Network Foundation tracks various metrics on its network. Below is the aggregate view of the month’s activity, previous month’s activity, and month-over-month change for a few key metrics.

Looking for definitions of each of these terms? Check out our previous monthly reports.

Product updates

Dispersed gets both Global and Windows OS Node Support, plus Website Updates

For Dispersed, the distributed compute network launched specifically for AI workloads, we’re now onboarding Windows OS GPUs now (in addition to Linux). If you’ve got a high performance GPU you’d like to put on the network, apply here.

We’re also accepting node applications from countries beyond the US or Canada.

For details on hardware specs and rewards, read RNP-021.

If you previously applied, we will be reviewing your application.

If you’re a builder, you might be pleased to know that we’ve recently added functionality that allows you to select the region they’d like to hire GPUs from.

Lastly, check out the newly added pages and content to the website, including a Product page, an About Us page, and a Resources page where you can read through our blog announcements, case studies, and more.

Render Network Product Updates

Manager App Enhancements

The Render Network Manager App received two releases in May, delivering a range of usability improvements, download workflow enhancements, and bug fixes designed to streamline the rendering experience.

Version 1.48.24 introduced significant upgrades to the downloads workflow, including bulk download functionality for selected jobs, download path validation, disk space verification, automatic retries for failed downloads, and the ability to prioritize downloading first and last frames.

New options such as “Skip Existing Frames” help users avoid unnecessary downloads and improve efficiency when managing large projects.

The release also improved the Open Cloud Storage (OCS) workflow, adding asset compression progress tracking, notifications for missing assets during hashing, and relocating hashed asset lists to a more accessible scene details view. Additional updates included support for displaying the latest render engine and plugin versions during job creation, improved folder naming for downloaded outputs, enhanced cross-platform drive handling, performance optimizations for projects with large frame counts, and clearer error reporting for API scope issues.

Version 1.48.31 followed with targeted fixes to the downloads system, resolving issues that could cause incorrect file formats to be saved to output folders and ensuring output lists reset properly after selective downloads.

Together, these updates continue to improve reliability, visibility, and efficiency across the rendering workflow.

Insydium Fused for Cinema 4D Now Available

Following a successful beta period announced at RenderCon 2026, support for the Insydium Fused package for Cinema 4D is now generally available on Render Network.

Cinema 4D creators can now render projects using the full Insydium Fused toolset, including X-Particles and other Fused modules, expanding the range of supported creative workflows available on the network.

Expanded Cloud Storage Integrations

Render Network has expanded its Cloud Storage Uploads feature with support for both Google Drive and Amazon S3.

Users can now connect Dropbox, Google Drive, or S3 storage to automatically upload scenes to the network through watch folders, simplifying project management and reducing manual file transfer steps. These additions provide greater flexibility for studios, teams, and individual creators working across a variety of cloud storage environments.

Artist Spotlight Number 1: Kasper Steernberg

Kasper Steernberg is a 3D artist and designer who has created visuals for artists like Victoria Monét, Marshmello, Tiesto, Jonna Fraser, and Zedd.

For one of his latest projects, Kasper created a series of intricate, neon-sign inspired stage visuals for Cardi B’s Little Miss Drama tour, rendered on Render Network:

Watch the full stage visual animation:

Check out Kasper’s Instagram for more of his work.

Artist Spotlight Number 2: Lit Candle

Render Network Foundation grant recipient Adnan of Lit Candle recently released a stunning cinematic reinterpretation of the original Need for Speed: Underground trailer, showcasing the level of craftsmanship possible with modern 3D workflows powered by Render Network.

Eight months in the making, the project features meticulously rebuilt vehicle assets, custom rain and atmospheric simulations in Houdini, look development and lighting in Blender and OctaneRender, and fully in-house sound design and color grading. Created as a tribute to the video game franchise that inspired Adnan’s journey into 3D, the piece reflects a commitment to technical excellence, manual artistry, and creative dedication.

The project serves as both a technical showcase and a celebration of a decade of growth as a 3D artist, with Render Network helping make the final cinematic vision possible.

Check out the trailer:

Announcements

SUBMERGE: Beyond the Render Case Study Now Available

In May we published our SUBMERGE: Beyond the Render case study. This case study is the most in-depth and technically detailed behind-the-scenes look we’ve ever published. The 18K, cinematic-quality exhibit is the largest immersive experience ever rendered on the decentralized Render Network.

The case study dives deep into the project’s production pipeline, covering everything from asset creation and scene optimization to rendering strategy and infrastructure considerations. It covers a lot of ground, from practical realities of producing high-end animated content to how decentralized GPU rendering can help creators scale ambitious projects without compromising quality.

Whether you’re an independent artist, creative studio, or production team, the case study walks through how decentralized rendering can support demanding 3D, animation, VFX, and digital content workflows.

Interested in using Render Network for your own cinematic, animation, VFX, or 3D graphics projects? Reach out to the team (on X, Instagram, LinkedIn or via email). We’d love to explore how we can support your next production.

RenderCon 2026 sessions are now available on demand

All 23 sessions from RenderCon 2026, the two-day event that bright together artists, technologists, and builders in April, are now available to watch on demand.

Check out the sessions:

16 artists rendered 18K digital art for a 270-degree space in 2 months

Any artist working in immersive media production frequently encounters a linear hardware bottleneck. ARTECHOUSE NYC is an immersive gallery that features an 18K resolution, 270-degree panoramic canvas with a higher pixel density than even the colossal Sphere in Las Vegas — one of the most advanced 16K LED displays. In this environment, the hardware bottleneck constrains creativity.

Until now, producing high-fidelity content for an environment of this nature required many months of production time. The majority of such a cycle is consumed by the latency of serial rendering on local workstations or centralized farms.

SUBMERGE: Beyond the Render was designed to change this. By using the decentralized GPU power of Render Network, 16 world-class artists simultaneously delivered 18K resolution, cinema-quality immersive works in a fraction of the typical timeline.

The exhibition demonstrates a fundamental shift in the production model, moving from restricted local workstations to a global, parallelized rendering infrastructure. This allows studios to compress months of production into weeks or even days, while substantially reducing the high costs associated with mainstream rendering solutions.

The Challenge in Rendering Multiple Pieces at 18K Resolution

Since its founding in 2015, ARTECHOUSE has focused on creating immersive, technology-driven art experiences that exist between cinema, installation, and spatial computing. ARTECHOUSE’s flagship is located in a 100-year-old boiler room beneath Chelsea Market; the architectural space became a seamless canvas that spans three walls and the floor, reproducing the finest details in full resolution.

The key challenge of staging art on this scale is the computational cost.

When ARTECHOUSE NYC opened in 2019, it set a new benchmark with an 18K panoramic canvas, representing 44% more pixels than the famed 16K Las Vegas Sphere. Back in 2019, an artist producing a single long-form work at this scale would need up to a year using a typical local setup with a single 3090 GPU. Even for experienced studios, the combination of resolution, scene complexity, and long runtimes made immersive production slow, expensive, and operationally risky.

Render Network emerged in 2017 with the goal of unblocking these bottlenecks by providing distributed access to GPU for rendering. Artists and studios tap into on-demand compute at a price that’s affordable for studios and individual artists.

For ARTECHOUSE and the artists participating in SUBMERGE: Beyond the Render, this partnership was an opportunity to align output scale with rendering throughput. By treating extreme resolution as a baseline rather than a technical ambition, the collaboration sought to remove the boundaries of immersive media production.

The Stakes: Bringing Cinematic-Quality Immersive Art to NYC

SUBMERGE: Beyond the Render was conceived as a large-scale exhibition that showcases what becomes possible when creative ambition is untethered from rendering constraints.

The show brings together different creative approaches to 3D and immersive media rather than being curated around a single theme or template. 12 artist teams were invited to contribute works spanning cinematic world-building, generative systems, hyper-real environments, and abstract, atmospheric spaces.

“We envisioned SUBMERGE as a kind of window into the future of immersive mediums, showcasing a broad spectrum of creative, aesthetic, and technical approaches to spatial storytelling. There is something for everyone — from fully immersive SciFi and musical experiences to playful, contemplative, avant-garde, and ethereal artworks.”

— Phillip Gara, VP of Strategy, OTOY (Render Network ecosystem partner that collaborated on SUBMERGE)

However, the technical requirements were uncompromising. Every contribution had to be delivered at a full 18K resolution and for a 270-degree environment.

Content is normally produced at 4K resolution (about 8 million pixels per frame) or 8K resolution (about 33 million pixels per frame). For ARTECHOUSE’s 18K canvas, the pieces had to be rendered at about 95 million pixels per frame. That is about three times the image data of 8K without compromising fine detail, smooth gradients, complex lighting or simulation-heavy effects.

Crucially, all 12 artist submissions had to be created simultaneously on a two-month timeline from initial concept to final delivery — a feat that would have been impossible using traditional cloud or in-house rendering solutions.

This was the point at which Render Network’s role became foundational to production. For the artists, the impact was felt most directly in the creative iteration cycle.

“Some of these creators would not have taken this job if they couldn’t iterate at this speed. What would normally be a multi-week rendering marathon locally was condensed into days or even hours, changing the stakes in terms of creative freedom.”

– Riki Kim, Executive Creative Director at ARTECHOUSE

Render Network enabled the parallel rendering of 12 productions, comparable in quality to those shown on the Las Vegas Sphere.

The result was a production environment where 12 teams, using different tools and pipelines, could simultaneously work toward a common delivery target without flattening their ideas to fit narrow technical constraints.

Why Existing Rendering Solutions Fail

For a project of SUBMERGE’s scale, centralized rendering workflows would quickly stall due to technical limitations and cost-prohibitive infrastructure. The challenges with working at this scale are manifold.

Establishing a Quality Baseline. Large-format immersive visuals can be produced quickly using composited layers, stylized effects, or procedural graphics. But the 270-degree immersive space used for SUBMERGE demanded more than simply staging large-format production. When viewers are surrounded by an image, even small inconsistencies in lighting or depth can break the sense of realism. Maintaining immersion requires frames that behave like coherent physical scenes rather than flat visual compositions.

This required SUBMERGE to deliver fully rendered 3D environments where every frame preserves realistic lighting, reflections, shadows, and depth at full 18K resolution. From the get-go, the creative ambition for this exhibit was to be of cinematic-level quality.

Creating Hollywood-grade content is computationally intensive. Traditional rendering infrastructure struggles to deliver the required quality at scale.

Local GPU workstations cannot render scenes of this complexity fast enough, and centralized render farms become prohibitively expensive when multiple teams need to iterate simultaneously. Without access to massively parallel GPU compute, maintaining this visual standard across every project would make the production timeline unworkable.

The Burden of Infrastructure Ownership. For high-fidelity 3D scenes involving dense geometry, advanced shading, volumetrics, and simulation, rendering at 18K resolution requires access to hundreds — often thousands — of high-performance GPUs operating in parallel. For high-impact, one-time events, it doesn’t make financial sense for a studio or production organization to invest in the massive hardware required to render such complex scenes.

While hyperscalers such as AWS allow renting, they essentially require users to “buy” infrastructure for a set period, paying for the GPU regardless of whether they’re using 10% or 100%.

Prohibitive Enterprise Pricing. Cloud rendering services often rely on enterprise-grade GPUs such as NVIDIA’s A-series to comply with data center commercial terms. These cards are priced at significant multiples of consumer-grade hardware — a cost that is passed directly to the user, creating a massive barrier to entry for boutique teams.

VRAM and Complexity Ceiling. Standard local workstations and even many mid-tier render farms would hit a hard limit on Video RAM (VRAM) when handling SUBMERGE’s massive 18K assets. When a scene’s complexity exceeds the memory capacity of a single machine, the render either fails or slows to a crawl, creating a barrier that prevents artists from realizing the full detail of their vision.

Ingestion and Licensing Bottlenecks. Centralized cloud solutions require a setup that adds significant friction. Artists must often set up Docker containers, manage complex remote licensing for each Digital Content Creation (DCC) tool, and provide credentials for every third-party plugin. This technical learning curve diverts time and energy away from actual creative production.

The Iteration Bottleneck. With a total project timeline of only two months, the established “upload-render-download” cycle of farms becomes a fatal bottleneck. Because existing solutions require a new upload of the entire rendering file for each change, however minor, the constant back-and-forth iterations required for a 95-megapixel project would have consumed the entire production schedule.

In a typical “staggered” pipeline, rendering is a final, separate step that can take days or weeks. This limits the rapid iteration required for a world-class immersive experience. Without the ability to render in parallel across hundreds of nodes, even minor adjustments to lighting or shading could set the project back by days.

How Render Network Delivered for SUBMERGE

For the SUBMERGE project, Render Network didn’t just provide more rendering power. It fundamentally changed the mechanics of the production pipeline in several ways, delivering benefits that turned the project from vision to reality. Specifically:

• 12 artists worked in parallel over 8 weeks
• 18K resolution across a 270-degree panoramic canvas
• 70x pipeline acceleration (compared with traditional cloud rendering)
• 26 months → 1 week rendering time

1. Limitless Scalability and Scene Complexity

Render Network uses a decentralized pool of high-VRAM GPUs, orchestrated via parallel processing. This gives even solo artists the same computational horsepower as a Tier-1 VFX house.

For SUBMERGE, this meant:

Breaking the VRAM Ceiling: SUBMERGE’s 95-megapixel assets were too heavy for standard local hardware to hold in memory. Render’s ability to tap into nodes with 24GB+ of VRAM ensured that 18K frames could be processed without crashing or downscaling. Scenes included high-density particle systems, volumetric lighting, and physics-based simulations that would crash local workstations.

A Simultaneous Pipeline: Render supported artists working simultaneously, rather than a staggered, serial workflow. While 12 different artist groups worked concurrently from across the globe over the 8-week window, they could all render high-resolution tests and final frames within a compressed timeline, often overlapping with one another, but without queuing.

Time Compression: By distributing these massive files across thousands of nodes, Render turned a process that would have taken weeks on a local workstation into one that took days or even hours, ensuring the team met an unmovable launch deadline.

2. Pipeline Efficiency through Differential Uploads

In a high-resolution 18K environment, file sizes are enormous. Typical cloud ingestion, which requires re-uploading an entire scene for every small change, would have been prohibitive given the two-month timeline. Render leverages differential uploading, a system that hashes scene data to identify exactly what has changed.

For SUBMERGE, differential uploading had a significant impact on iteration, since only the new or modified data needed to be synced with the network.

The 70x Acceleration Factor: This streamlined workflow accelerated scene preparation and ingestion by up to 70x compared to typical centralized cloud workflows. The SUBMERGE artists could iterate at their own speed, moving from a “submit and wait” culture to a “tweak and render” workflow that supports the constant process of creative refinement required for world-class quality.

3. Seamless Interoperability (Octane & ORBX)

To understand Render’s impact, it is essential to clarify the relationship between OTOY’s OctaneRender engine and the ORBX file format.

OctaneRender is the industry’s first and fastest unbiased, physically correct GPU render engine. OTOY does not license Octane for use on cloud render farms, and OctaneRender is available for distributed GPU rendering on Render Network. This means Render Network is an optimal solution for studios that require Octane’s photorealistic output at scale.

ORBX is an interchangeable “container” format designed to encapsulate every element of a 3D scene, including geometry, high-resolution textures, complex lighting, and materials, into a single, atomic file natively understood by Render Network. The ORBX file format facilitates hashing and thus enables differential uploading.

For SUBMERGE, this meant:

• Zero Setup Overhead: Because ORBX acts as a self-contained exported output, it removes the dependency on native Digital Content Creation (DCC) files. Artists could work in their preferred tools — such as Cinema4D or Houdini — and export directly to the network without configuring Docker containers or virtual machines. This allowed the 12 artist groups who worked on SUBMERGE to focus entirely on the immersive creative experience rather than technical infrastructure management.
• Eliminating Licensing Friction: Cloud farms require studios to set up their own licensing and provide credentials for every remote node. In contrast, Render’s ORBX-based workflow includes licensing entitlements, meaning the SUBMERGE artists could render distributed jobs without re-entering proof-of-purchase for every individual node.

Render Network vs. Centralized Solutions

Pipeline Overview: 12 Artist Groups, 5 Distinct Technical Bottlenecks

The exhibition features twelve unique pieces produced by a diverse group of individual artists and artistic pairings, ranging from Emmy winners to emerging 3D luminaries. They faced various technical challenges when scaling their work to an 18K environment.

1. AI-native pipeline scaling
2. Heavy physics + light simulations
3. Compressing “impossible” production timelines
4. Legacy IP upscaling
5. High-fidelity texture and color precision

1. AI-native pipeline scaling: Bridging the resolution gap between generative AI outputs and cinematic exhibition standards

William Selviz + Manuel Sainsily, a creative duo working at the intersection of immersive media and generative tools, created Protopica: Sin Agua No Hay Tiempo. Their core creative tool was OpenAI’s Sora, which introduced a major production constraint, as Sora outputs video at standard resolutions and cannot natively produce ultra-high-resolution frames for final exhibition.

To bridge this, the duo built a hybrid pipeline using Render Network to upscale, denoise, and re-render AI-generated assets at full production resolution. Distributed rendering enabled an AI-native workflow to move from creation to final large-format delivery without rebuilding the project in a separate pipeline.

“Render Network allows me to compete as an independent creator. In the future, this kind of IP will come from individuals, not studios.”

— William Selviz, SUBMERGE artist, quoted in PCMag

2. Heavy physics + light simulations: Overcoming VRAM ceilings and computationally heavy light-path calculations for complex, reflective 3D environments

This group dealt with immense computational loads, where high-density particle systems and physics-based lighting exceeded the memory of standard workstations.

FVCKRENDER is a Montreal-born self-taught artist whose work is defined by sharp, crystalline geometry and futuristic architecture. In his piece, Infinite Fields, the hurdle was the complexity of light-path calculations across countless sharp, reflective crystalline surfaces, which typically creates a bottleneck for centralized hardware.

David Ariew and Chelsea Evenstar faced a similar challenge. Known for their mastery of light and “cosmic” architectural environments, their piece — 1685: Immersive — was originally created as a “cosmic cathedral” collaboration with Grammy-winning artist Zedd for his 2025 Coachella set. For displaying at SUBMERGE, they utilized complex reflections and physics-based lighting that required massive VRAM to calculate.

Likewise, Josh Pierce’s digital art and motion designs focus on the intersection of nature, presence, and spiritual stillness. In his piece, Satori: The Infinite Now, the lush-looking landscapes utilized high-density scatter systems for foliage and volumetric light-beam simulations that exceeded the capacity of high-end workstations.

By using Render Network, this group had the computational headroom required to process heavy-duty simulations and industry-leading light calculations, without simplifying the creative vision or suffering system crashes.

“It feels like more of a partnership with the 3D software because it’s really based on how physics work. I throw some light in there, and then I get to see what comes out of that kind of mystical box.”

— David Ariew, SUBMERGE artist

“Render Network is an incredibly powerful tool for 3D artists to be able to generate these worlds on a really rich level that can’t be done any other way.”

— Josh Pierce, SUBMERGE artist

Compressing “impossible” production timelines: Reducing multi-year render forecasts for procedural and algorithmic work

For these artists, the main barrier was less about complexity than the timeline required to render their work locally.

MHXis a self-taught visual artist specializing in generative art and algorithmic growth. His contribution, LATTICE, is a complex display of procedural simulations. He estimates it would have taken 26 months to render at 18K on his local setup — a timeline that he compressed to one week by harnessing Render Network.

Amrit Pal Singh’s work has a very different aesthetic, but he faced a similarly impossible timeline. Singh is a Delhi-based 3D illustrator celebrated for blending digital craft with the tactile nostalgia of physical collectibles. His piece, Adventures of the Toy Maker, required rendering vast, playful worlds with soft lighting and high-density textures at a scale that was computationally prohibitive on his local workstation.

In both of these cases, Render Network acted as a “force multiplier,” compressing a 26-month forecast (MHX) into less than a week, and a multi-month estimate (Singh) into a three-day turnaround.

“It’s not just about speed; it’s about making the impossible actually possible for a solo artist.”

— MHX, SUBMERGE artist

“Seeing your work on this scale is mind-blowing for any artist. It’s almost like a superpower. On my computer, it would still take a few months to render the whole 3-minute animation. With Render Network, it took me three days.”

— Amrit Pal Singh, SUBMERGE artist

Legacy IP upscaling: Reimagining and expanding standard assets for an 18K, 270-degree panoramic canvas

These artists transformed existing high-quality work into immersive spatial experiences, bypassing the “render penalty” that usually prevents such scaling.

Maciej Kuciara and Emily Yang are Emmy award-winning creators who adapted their celebrated White Rabbit universe into a physical, spatial experience for SUBMERGE. The original version of White Rabbit, which won the 2025 Emmy for Outstanding Innovation in Emerging Media Programming, was authored for 4K on standard screens, but the ARTECHOUSE canvas required a leap to 18K for a 270-degree environment.

Woosung Kang (aka VJ WOOO) is an Emmy-nominated motion designer who transformed a decade of his legacy work into a piece for SUBMERGE titled Nebula Junkyard. It blends high-intensity scenes from multiple past projects, re-rendered for ARTECHOUSE’s 18K, 270-degree canvas.

Gavin Shapiro, known for his viral loops with billions of views, also reached into his archive, expanding his 2021 loop called Wingin It into a high-fidelity experience. The transition from a 4K screen to an 18K environment while preserving the crisp, satirical detail presented a severe hardware bottleneck.

By using Render Network, this group bypassed hardware limitations, allowing them to treat massive data sets as fluid creative playgrounds and hit deadlines that were otherwise unreachable.

“For most of my career, the scale of my imagination was limited by access to resources. SUBMERGE changes that equation… this show proves we can produce work that rivals, and even surpasses, what comes out of the biggest studios.”

— Maciej Kuciara, SUBMERGE artist

“It’s amazing that in Artechouse you can see the audience react to an immersive space with three side walls, even the floor. It’s a truly special experience.”

— Woosung Kang, SUBMERGE artist

“I wanted to take advantage of the emotional response from seeing a physical piece of performance art, and combine that with the strengths of digital tools, which let you do things you’d never be able to do otherwise.”

— Gavin Shapiro, SUBMERGE artist

High-Fidelity Texture & Color Precision: Maintaining visual integrity and seamless color transitions at a 95-megapixel scale

When work is projected at museum scale, subtle technical flaws like “banding” become glaring errors, presenting a specific technical challenge for artists relying on visual integrity for impact.

Blake Kathryn and Maalavidaa are a collaborative duo whose work explores “femme surrealism” and abstract color therapy. The River Remembers is a vibrant, pastel-hued dreamscape that relies on soft gradients and subtle transitions between hues, meaning it’s highly sensitive to compression and resolution limits. On a standard render farm, these smooth gradients often break, creating visible lines that shatter the immersive illusion.

Jess Wiseman is a 3D artist and creative technologist known for her ability to find the surreal within mundane environments. Her SUBMERGE piece, Cycle Reset, includes hyper-realistic experiences that rely on texture-first fidelity to recreate chrome sheens, fabric textures, and even the fluff of popcorn, which all demand ultra-high resolution to remain effective in a 270-degree immersive space.

For this group, Render Network provided “big studio” infrastructure to output high-bitrate files that maintained seamless color transitions and fine detail, ensuring the emotional “flow” and tactile realism were not lost.

“For the first SUBMERGE show, myself and a handful of artists rendered at half the full scale due to limitations at that time, which shows how far the technology has come in a year.”

— Blake Kathryn

“Normally, you have an idea, but then you also have the logistics of ‘Can my computer actually do it in time?’ Not having to worry about that opened pretty much any idea to be created.”

— Jess Wiseman, SUBMERGE artist

While these creative visions vary in aesthetic, they all share a common reliance on a specific set of technical breakthroughs enabled by Render Network.

What This Means for the Future of Immersive Art

The success of SUBMERGE signals a shift in the economics of digital creation. As the industry moves toward increasingly sophisticated spatial environments and higher resolutions, the accessibility of high-performance compute has become the most significant barrier.

By decentralizing the rendering process, Render Network has effectively democratized the tools for large-scale production, allowing independent artists and boutique studios to compete with Tier-1 studios. The future of immersive art lies in removing technical friction, where the leap from a 4K concept to an 18K museum installation is a seamless operational step rather than a prohibitive financial or time-based risk.

Looking toward the next iteration of digital experiences, the ability to scale compute power on demand will be a defining factor in which stories get told. Render Network is committed to providing that scalable infrastructure, ensuring that as display technology evolves, creators have the raw power needed to inhabit it.

To see how you or your studio’s production pipeline can be accelerated affordably, check out the Render Network at rendernetwork.com.

RenderCon 2026 saw 50 speakers and 23 sessions across two days

2 days. 2 stages. 23 sessions. 50 speakers.

RenderCon 2026 brought together artists, filmmakers, technologists, and builders working at the edge of media, AI, and decentralized compute.

Across two days in Hollywood, the conversation centered on how the future of storytelling is being shaped by content creation tools and trends, emerging AI workflows, and the growing need for scalable GPU infrastructure.

From keynote sessions to artist panels, RenderCon this year highlighted a growing interest in scalable, interactive, and iterative creative loops.

Day one opened with Jules Urbach delivering a keynote packed with observations and examples of real work products delivered through the latest version of OTOY’s Canvas product and forward-looking tech slated to run on Render Network in the near future.

The day continued with perspectives on broader trends and insights from a wide swath of technologists and leaders speaking on the event’s mainstage, including Richard Kerris of NVIDIA, Francesco Siddi of the Blender Foundation, Zheru Liu of Kling AI, and Daniel Berkovitz of LTX Studio. Check out the full program.

The talks showcased the thinking of creators-turned-panelists such as Fede Alvarez, director of Alien: Romulus, Alex Ross, long-time comic book artist for DC and Marvel, and four of the 16 artists who designed the most ambitious and largest-scale Render Network-support project to date, SUBMERGE: Beyond the Render.

Day two focused on more immersive conversations with creatives and builders in addition to both Dispersed and Render Network product updates, workshops, demos, and case studies. From Render Network and Dispersed product updates and demos, to workshops on unique VFX workflows and artists showcasing their latest projects, the audience took note of what their fellow creators had to share.

Key Themes from the Stage

From Rendering to Real-Time Creation. In the Future of Cinema panel, Richard Kerris (NVIDIA) and Fede Álvarez explored how workflows are evolving from waiting on renders to manipulating content in real time. This shift is redefining how stories are built, making narrative the driver, rather than software constraints.

AI as a Creative Loop, Not a Shortcut. Across multiple sessions, speakers emphasized that AI is most powerful when integrated into the creative process, not used as a replacement for it. Real-time video generation, simulation environments, and world-building tools are enabling faster iteration while still relying on human direction and taste.

The Importance of Craft. Despite rapid advances in automation, creators shared their perspective around the symbiotic relationship between tech and artistry. The physical and emotional process of making — whether on set, in 3D, or in immersive environments — remains central to meaningful work. Technology opens doors by facilitating workflows.

The Compute Bottleneck. In his talk on building “holodeck”-like experiences, Emad Mostaque underscored a recurring constraint: compute. As the cost of creating assets approaches zero, access to GPUs becomes the limiting factor.

During the Dispersed case studies session, five builders articulated the individual challenges they were solving for and their unique solution to each problem, powered by the decentralized network of GPUs on Dispersed.

Expanding the Language of Media. From neural rendering to Gaussian splats, world models, and agent-driven workflows, discussions throughout the event pointed to a future where tools become more adaptive.

Catch the 86-second highlights reel:

The RenderCon 2026 Immersive Portrait Gallery

Our team wanted to provide a fun, immersive experience that showcased a lot of the tech that was the topic of conversation throughout the two days. Attendees who chose to participate in the immersive experience had the chance to have their photo taken to be turned into various creative portraits that were displayed on a screen in the room.

Now, we’ve turned those images into a rotating gallery. Check it out.

Check out the panel recordings now available

Sessions are now available to watch on-demand. Full session recordings are releasing throughout the month.

Ecosystem metrics

The Render Network Foundation tracks various metrics on its network. Below is the aggregate view of the month’s activity, previous month’s activity, and month-over-month change for a few key metrics.

Key Render Network metrics

*A note on the foundation node rewards vs. prior month: The rendering node operated by the Render Network Foundation was connected, at the hardware level, for the full month, generating the typical monthly costs. However, the software wasn’t connecting properly and though it was eventually restarted, it did not run as expected for a portion of the month. Hence the node was unable to get assigned rendering tasks, earning fewer rewards than would have been expected.

Node Operator Rewards (in RENDER)

Looking for definitions of each of these terms? Check out our previous monthly reports.

Product updates

How Developers Are Building on Dispersed, From RenderCon 2026

Last month we expanded node recruiting and onboarding to include Canada-based node operators with more regions rolling out in the coming weeks.

GPUs that meet the specifications for the network are encouraged to apply as we anticipate growth in usage. Interested operators can apply here: https://waitlist.renderfoundation.com/

At RenderCon, multiple users showcased what they’re building on Dispersed.

Omniscient Inc: A decentralized AI memory layer to Preserve User Privacy and Sovereignty Across AI Tools

Hannah Barris, CEO of Omniscient Inc. reminded the audience of the challenges with privacy — specifically the lack thereof — with current AI chat products. To address it, she developed Omniscient, a decentralized AI memory layer that transforms stateless AI tools into persistent, personalized systems by aggregating and structuring user-owned data into a continuously evolving context engine.

Built on composable infrastructure (e.g., Manifest Network and Dispersed), it leverages decentralized compute networks to enable portable, containerized workloads across providers, ensuring data sovereignty, privacy, and resilience without vendor lock-in.

As model capabilities converge, Omniscient positions context ownership as the key competitive advantage. The goal is to allow users to retain control of their data while powering more accurate, context-aware AI experiences across any model or platform.

Interested in testing it out*? Omniscient has opened their waitlist: https://omniscient.site

*Not an endorsement from the Render Network Foundation.

OrbitRisk: Predictive Satellite Risk Intelligence

Avia Kraft, CEO of Corpus Park, walked the audience through OrbitRisk, a real-time analytics platform that transforms complex orbital, environmental, and cybersecurity data into actionable risk intelligence for satellite operators and insurers.

OrbitalRisk combines live inputs like collision probability, space weather, and encryption vulnerabilities with orbital mechanics modeling. The output is dynamic risk profiles and forward-looking projections that surface hidden patterns, clusters, and emerging threats.

The platform is designed for interactive visualizations and customizable risk parameters that allow users to assess exposures across fleets, simulate future scenarios, and make informed operational and insurance decisions. The platform’s ability to ingest user-provided data and uncover novel, non-obvious risks makes it a powerful tool for proactively managing assets in an increasingly congested and volatile space environment.

Sarson Funds and Manifest Network: On-Demand GPU Infrastructure for AI Agents

Jon Gutwillig represented Manifest Network, in partnership with Sarson Funds, demonstrating a decentralized infrastructure model where AI applications dynamically access distributed GPU resources to power real-time, multi-model workflows.

Applications like Agent1 (an encrypted, multi-model AI assistant) and Suma (a crypto portfolio analysis tool) orchestrate multiple GPU jobs per query, ranging from embeddings to inference. The goal is to select the most cost-efficient hardware for each task across networks. This architecture enables scalable, on-demand compute without idle overhead, allowing AI agents to “hire” GPUs programmatically as needed. The result is a flexible, privacy-preserving, and economically efficient system that turns AI from a static service into an active consumer of decentralized compute infrastructure.

Render Network Updates: Adding Google Drive Cloud Storage and Insydium Fused Now in Beta

Cloud Storage to Expand to Google Drive Soon

Cloud storage upload, already available for Dropbox will be available for Google Drive in May! This feature allows Render Network users to set up a watch folder to automatically upload scenes to the network. Try it out.

Cinema 4D Fused Packages in Beta on Render Network

Cinema 4D users might be interested in the following product news coming out of RenderCon 2026: Render Network is adding support for the Insydium Fused package for Cinema 4D, including X-Particles and other Fused packages. This feature is currently available for beta testing. Interested in trying it out? Reach out to us across our socials including Discord, X, or within the Webapp chat support feature.

Governance Updates

RNP-023 Passes the Final Vote, Bringing Salad Network into the Render Network Ecosystem for Node Rewards and Payments

RNP-023 was proposed in March and passed the final voting round in April, enabling Salad Technologies to use RENDER as its exclusive payments infrastructure for node operators.

The existing network has 60,000 active GPUs, serving real-world compute use cases since 2018. The team at Salad sought to integrate an existing onchain payments layer that made sense for their operations, ultimately choosing Render Network to fill this need. This proposal is estimated to contribute $2.3M towards burns, and $2.1M towards RENDER-based node operator rewards in its first year after full integration.

In the News

Render Network on AllInCrypto: Scaling Compute for the Next Era of AI and Media

This month, Trevor Harris-Jones, Board Member of the Render Network Foundation, joined the All In Crypto podcast to discuss the origins of the network, its evolution, and the growing role of decentralized GPU infrastructure.

The conversation begins with the early challenge that led to Render Network’s creation: a large-scale content production project that would have taken months — even while utilizing major centralized cloud resources. That bottleneck ultimately sparked the idea of distributing rendering workloads across a global network of GPUs.

Key themes from the discussion to listen for:

• Why centralized compute doesn’t always scale for creative demand
• The rise of decentralized GPU networks
• Expanding beyond rendering into general compute
• Why demand for compute will continue to grow

The full episode explores how Render Network fits into a rapidly evolving landscape where compute is becoming one of the most critical resources in both AI and digital content creation.

Artist Spotlight: SUBMERGE — Beyond the Render

This month’s spotlight highlights the artists behind SUBMERGE: Beyond the Render, the immersive exhibition at ARTECHOUSE NYC, several of whom joined us on stage at RenderCon 2026.

Featuring Blake Kathryn, David Ariew, Woo-Sung Kang, and Joshua Pierce, the panel offered a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to create art for an 18K, 270-degree environment.

A few standout insights:

Scaling creative ambition

David Ariew shared that one piece — originally created at 7K — was adapted to 18K for SUBMERGE. Rendering on a personal setup would have taken an estimated two years, underscoring the role of distributed GPU rendering in making these works feasible.

Designing across formats

Woo-Sung Kang described how his project evolved across multiple formats. He talked about going from a traditional stage setup to a fully immersive installation, and later into a VR experience. Each iteration required new technical and creative considerations along the way.

Building beyond what’s visible

Blake Kathryn approached her piece as a full 360-degree world, even though only 270 degrees are displayed in the physical space — prioritizing artistic intent over technical constraints.

Pushing technical limits

Joshua Pierce worked with complex volumetric data (VDBs) at 18K resolution, facing render times of several minutes per frame. With Render Network, the project was completed ahead of schedule without compromising quality.

More broadly, the panel reinforced the idea that, as digital and physical experiences continue to converge, immersive art will play an increasingly important role. Scalable compute infrastructure will be essential to bringing those experiences to life.

Thanks for reading, see you next month!

RenderCon 2026 full lineup and program is live!

The preeminent conference for artists, studios, AI builders, and compute leaders is days away.

The full speaker lineup is top tier. Check out the program for the two-day event.

On April 16–17 at Nya Studios in Hollywood, artists, studios, AI builders, and compute leaders will come together for two days of bleeding edge talks and workshops exploring the future of rendering, AI, and decentralized infrastructure.April 16–17, 2026 · Hollywood, California.

Get tickets now.

Get 50% off tickets with code: COUNTDOWNTORC.

Ecosystem metrics

The Render Network Foundation tracks various metrics on its network. Below is the aggregate view of the month’s activity, previous month’s activity, and month-over-month change for a few key metrics.

Looking for definitions of each of these terms? Check out our previous monthly reports.

Product updates

Dispersed Sees Week-on-Week Usage Growth in March

March brought continued momentum for Dispersed, the distributed GPU network designed for AI workloads and general compute jobs.

March saw multiple week-over-week usage increases reflecting growing interest in distributed, cost-efficient GPU infrastructure for emerging inference and compute-heavy use cases.

At the same time, Dispersed is ramping up recruitment of node operators to support growing demand and expand available capacity across the network.

Node Operator Incentives

Qualified node operators currently receive 6 RENDER weekly, in addition to any RENDER earned from completed compute jobs. Details on rewards per GPU type can be found here.

This model is designed to reward both availability and active participation, while helping scale the supply side of the network as demand for decentralized compute continues to grow.

Does your hardware qualify?

Apply here:

waitlist.renderfoundation.com

Governance Updates

RNP-023 Proposes Salad Network Integrating With the Render Network for Node Rewards and Payments

A new governance proposal was introduced in March: RNP-023 proposes integrating Salad into the Render Network as a subnet.

The integration would bring Salad’s real-world demand and active GPU network onto Render Network. Specifically it seeks to move node rewards onchain and enable RENDER-based payment as an option for customers.

Salad estimates $4.3M in revenue in the first year of integration. Rewards to node operators resulting from that activity would, under this initiative, now be issued in RENDER. Additionally, the Salad team plans to implement payment in RENDER as an option for customers.

Why It Matters

Salad’s integration of Render Network as their onchain payments layer reflects growing alignment between decentralized payment infrastructure and real-world compute marketplaces. Per the Salad team, the integration would support a transition of distributed computing rewards and payment options onchain using RENDER while preserving existing customer workflows across its core products.

For the Render Network ecosystem, the proposal is an opportunity to grow both demand-side utility and sustained token burns, while broadening the network’s role in powering practical compute use cases.

In the News

Render Network Featured in The Verge on OpenAI’s Decision to Shut Down Video Generation Tool Sora

Render Network Foundation board member Trevor Harries-Jones was quoted in The Verge in a March 28th article following OpenAI’s decision to shut down Sora, commenting on the speed of innovation and fierce competition shaping the AI video market. His remarks reflected a broader shift in the space: as model quality improves across the board, creators are increasingly evaluating tools based on practical output, reliability, and workflow fit, not just launch hype.

Why OpenAI killed Sora

Render Network on the BlockHash podcast: Rendering, AI, and the Next Phase of Distributed Compute

Trevor Harries-Jones also joined the BlockHash podcast in March to discuss the evolution of the Render Network from distributed rendering for motion graphics and VFX into a broader decentralized GPU network supporting both creative and AI workloads.

The conversation covered hybrid AI plus rendering workflows, the growing importance of open creative tools like Blender, and how distributed consumer GPUs will play an increasing role in inference, creator tooling, and future world model workloads.

Catch it on any of the following podcast platforms:

Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/3dpapyjx

Apple Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/msbxe4cw

Amazon Music: https://tinyurl.com/472sye4x

YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/477k8y5t