Akash Network, the decentralized GPU and cloud-compute marketplace, has begun the formal process of migrating from its Cosmos-based akashnet-2 chain to Solana mainnet. On October 26 at 23:02 UTC, governance Proposal #346 opened, asking AKT holders to approve moving the marketplace onto Solana as native programs. The vote runs through November 2 and requires a 33.4% quorum with a simple majority. While early community reports indicated roughly 98% support, the formal governance process remains open.
Co-founder Greg Osuri outlined the decision in a migration report. The core argument is cost: Akash currently maintains about 100 validators, forks of cosmos-sdk, CometBFT and gogoproto, and a CosmWasm subsystem mainly used for Pyth price feeds. On Solana, applications inherit security from the validator set with no bonding or staking requirement. Osuri wrote, “Akash stops paying for a chain it does not use,” and estimated the entire marketplace's network fees at about 0.075 SOL per day, roughly $7.60 at Solana's price near $100.77. The report also notes DePIN projects such as Helium, Render, io.net, Hivemapper and Nosana already cluster on Solana, and Solana holds about $15 billion in stablecoins and sees about 2.2 million daily fee payers.
The migration is deliberately sequenced. AKT would relaunch as a Solana SPL token at a one-to-one ratio, keeping the same ticker, six decimals and total supply, with a one-way migration portal open for two years. Staked AKT must first complete the 21-day unbonding period before crossing. The marketplace cutover would occur only after additional audits, migration rehearsals and a second governance vote. Existing workloads would keep running for 90 days after cutover, while staking rewards would end at cutover and validator income would stop when the old chain is finally halted.
Solana beat an existing EVM layer-2 finalist in Akash's evaluation. Akash's modeling found marketplace operations about nine times cheaper on Solana in calm conditions and roughly 300 times cheaper under load, with bids costing about $0.0008 versus $0.007 on an EVM L2. Solana's reliability also met the required 99.5% liveness over 24 months, and the announcement noted the recent Alpenglow upgrade cut finality from 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds.
AKT rose about 4% to approximately $0.68 after the proposal opened, with a market cap near $203 million and 24-hour volume around $6.7 million. The token remains roughly 92% below its April 2021 all-time high of $8.07, and the market response has been measured. The larger significance is strategic: Akash is the latest Cosmos-based project to conclude that Solana offers cheaper settlement and better distribution than running a standalone appchain.
