Render Network

Render Network was first introduced in August 2017 by Jules Ubach, the founder of GPU-based software technology company OTOY, Inc. With Render Network, Ubach aimed to build a peer-to-peer platform that harnesses idle GPU resources to provide affordable and accessible rendering to creators without compromising rendering quality.

OTOY, Inc., initially deployed the project token on Ethereum as an ERC-20 token offered across a two-phase token sale from 2017 to 2018. Before Render’s mainnet launch, the project team migrated the RNDR token to a new contract in February 2019, decreasing the initially proposed maximum token supply from ~2.15 billion to ~536.87 million. After a three-phase development journey through 2017 and 2018, a private Genesis mainnet went live in June 2019. This release integrated the RNDR token with Octane Render Cloud (ORC), OTOY, Inc.’s proprietary rendering engine. Public access to Render Network became fully available in April 2020.

In March 2021, Render Network bridged the ERC-20 RNDR to Polygon due to concerns about rising gas costs on Ethereum. In July 2022, the project team introduced Render Improvement Proposals (RNP) to encourage community contributions to Render’s development. It also formed the Render Network Foundation in January 2023, an entity responsible for facilitating community participation in governance via RNPs and funding ecosystem growth initiatives via grant programs.

In November 2021, the project team announced its plans to launch on Solana and eventually migrated its infrastructure and token contract in November 2023. With its migration to Solana, Render Network extended its capabilities beyond rendering and toward offering GPU computing services via an external API to third-party computing clients. ANTBIT.IO (io.net) was the first third-party compute client to receive API access to Render Network’s compute resources for processing computing tasks like machine learning training, inference, and fine-tuning. Other third-party compute clients, including Beam, Nosana, and FEDML, have been granted API access for more extensive computing tasks beyond rendering.

Prior to Render Network’s transition to Solana in November 2023, node operators were compensated in the ERC-20 RNDR token on Ethereum for providing rendering services. The launch introduced the Burn-and-Mint Equilibrium (BME) model which was subsequently implemented in December 2023. The BME model enabled (i) onchain payments in SPL RENDER for rendering jobs, (ii) predictable job pricing, and (iii) incentivized node participation with rewards.

In January 2024, voting has started on proposal RNP 008 to introduce Nosana as the Render Network's fourth Compute Client, which was approved with 100% voting in favor in February of the same year.

In February 2024, Coinbase added support for RENDER on the Solana network. By March, the team proposed a collaboration with Stability AI to create a dataset of 3D assets for model training, leveraging Render's GPU network and Stability's AI expertise.

By June 2024, the team accepted the RNP 000 Modifications with 83% of the votes in favor. The proposal aimed to simplify and streamline the RNP structure by consolidating sections and removing redundant information.

By July 2024, major exchanges such as Binance, OKX and Bybit, among others, migrated the RNDR token from Ethereum to the new RENDER version on Solana.

In August 2024, the Render Network announced the launch of their Cinema4D Wizard, a new feature that simplifies the process of rendering 3D content on the Render Network directly from within Cinema4D. In October the same year, Blender Cycles entered a closed beta phase on the Render Network as part of RNP 014.

In November 2024, following positive regulatory tailwinds for Token-backed digital asset ETPs, the 21Shares RNDR ETP was listed. In December 2024, Valour also launched it's Render ETP as part of a batch of 20 new products.

By April 2025, voting on a proposal for sustainable emissions and rewards framework for Open Compute GPU node operators was established in RNP 019. After an initial rejection, the proposal was later approved in May 2025. Following the passing of RNP 019, the Render Network introduced the Render Compute Network, an initiative seeking to expand support from solely 3D rendering tasks to AI and general-purpose workloads. Additionally, in April RenderCon 2025 also took place, featuring Render-Solana integrations, enabling low-latency GPU task submission and advancing the use of Solana as a high-throughput backbone for decentralized compute.

In June, eToro listed the RENDER token alongside 33 additional assets for their U.S customers.

By October, RNP-021 was proposed, expanding the framework of RNP-019 to include enterprise-grade GPUs such as the NVIDIA H100, H200, A100, AMD MI300 series, and others. By doing so, the network could serve more demanding workloads, such as large-scale AI model training or advanced video and image generation, via a decentralized compute infrastructure model. In November, RNP-21 was successfully approved with 98.8% votes in favor.