Akash Network proposes leaving its Cosmos chain for Solana
Regulation & Gov ·
The decentralized cloud-computing network says it will rebuild its marketplace on Solana and convert AKT into a native token there, contingent on a series of governance votes.
Akash's core team has outlined a plan to exit its own sovereign chain, akashnet-2, and recreate the marketplace as native programs on Solana mainnet, according to a blog post from the project. No cutover date has been set; that step requires a separate governance vote that can only occur after audits and migration rehearsals are completed, and workloads would keep running for 90 days post-cutover so tenants have time to redeploy. The plan is also being tracked by wublockchain.xyz, which frames the move as a shift away from the Cosmos SDK to cut maintenance costs and staking requirements.
The team's stated rationale centers on cost and scale. Roughly 100 validators currently bond AKT solely to secure consensus, while the core team maintains custom forks of cosmos-sdk, CometBFT and gogoproto; network fees for the entire marketplace run about 0.075 SOL a day, equal to a few dollars. By comparison, a median Solana transaction costs about $0.001, and Akash's roughly 15,000 daily marketplace transactions would remain negligible next to Solana's 112 million daily user transactions even at 100 times current volume.
The blog post also points to other decentralized-infrastructure projects — Helium, Render, io.net, Hivemapper and Nosana — that already settle on Solana, citing Helium's 2023 chain exit and Render's token migration as precedent. It notes Solana's position as the top chain by weekly DEX volume, its $15 billion in stablecoins, and about 2.2 million daily fee payers, contrasting this with consolidation across Cosmos, where Noble, its stablecoin chain, departed in March 2026.
Under the proposed sequence, AKT would move first: two weeks after a migration proposal passes, and only once two independent audits clear, the team would launch AKT as an SPL token and open a one-way migration portal for two years. The marketplace itself would migrate later, after further audits and rehearsals, with tenants keeping existing SDL files and live leases while providers upgrade a single daemon and re-register.
The team acknowledges the migration means giving up sovereign consensus, validator income, native IBC connectivity and the standing of running an independent chain. Nothing changes for live workloads before cutover, and the process still requires submission of a migration proposal on akashnet-2 followed by at least two further votes — a cutover proposal and a sunset upgrade — before any transition takes effect.