Decentralized GPUs: The Missing Infrastructure Layer for AI, Trading, and Blockchain Applications

There is this invisible backbone behind every technological wave, that’s like the infrastructure layer that quietly powers breakthroughs even though they rarely get the spotlight. During the early days of the internet, both servers and networking hardware were there. During the mobile boom, we had app stores and wireless carriers. Currently, artificial intelligence, algorithmic trading, and blockchain applications are converging, at the heart of it all sits a single resource called GPUs.

  The graphics processing unit, which were once designed to make video games prettier, they have evolved into modern computation workhorses. Large language models are trained, they can even execute high frequency trades, and also render complex blockchain powered metaverse worlds. But here’s the catch, quietly the access to GPU is now one of the biggest bottlenecks of our time.

Here, OpNode will play its  role. Not just as a niche experiment, it is rather the missing infrastructure layer which the next decade of innovation will depend on.

The GPU Crunch Nobody Saw Coming

During the year 2022, while working on an institutional grade trading system, the OpNode team discovered firsthand the crippling costs of GPU. Actually, they weren’t trying to build the next blockbuster AI app or perhaps even training a model with billions of parameters. All they simply tried to do, was to maintain an extremely low latency trading algorithm across the U.S. equities and crypto markets.

Challenging as it was, to continuously analyze tick data from over a thousand stocks and hundreds of cryptocurrencies, even to optimize strategies in real time, and also executing trades in over 200 milliseconds. Speed is important for that system, also to be adaptable and relentlessly precise.

GPUs was definitely the obvious solution. A whole lots of them. But, reality can hit hard. For the infrastructure to keep humming, over 50 NVIDIA A100s were needed. Which was at roughly eighty dollars per GPU per day, the monthly bill ended up soaring over a hundred thousand.

A team that is boot strapped, that figure is surely unsustainable. They weren’t even alone in this, as AI startups, blockchain developers, and even research labs were all running into the same wall which was GPU scarcity and skyrocketing costs.

Why Centralized Cloud Won’t Solve This

Merely looking at the major cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, it’s easy to notice the GPUs they have on offer. But, users have the economies stacked against them. Demand is surging, and this companies are fully aware. Even the AI workloads are doubling after every three months. For the figure of ten times every eighteen months, the compute needs are scaling. In the hands of the providers, pricing power will continue to stay when supply is tight.

There are some problems which are massive, that it creates. There is an increase in cost, because renting GPUs from the cloud looks like paying for bottled water in the desert. It may seem overpriced, but it’s necessary. When you build your system around a specific cloud provider’s architecture, it becomes painfully expensive to switch. 

Margins depend on compute efficiency for industries. Just like trading or where innovation depends on experimentation like AI research. These can be crippling constraints.

A Glimpse of the OpNode Alternative

A handful of corporations, not having to control the GPU access is the thought to be considered. OpNode was born out of this exact frustration. 

A scenario that a network where anyone with spare GPU capacity, whether it’s in a data center, a university lab, or even at home. It could contribute their hardware. Pooled together, secured and coordinated with blockchain will the compute power be, and also made available at market driven rates to users.

The OpNode works with this vision. Availability and costs won’t be dictated by a few centralized suppliers. Instead we have a global marketplace for compute. More competitive prices. There is also organic expansion of supply as contributors joined. No single provider acts as a gatekeeper more importantly.

Why GPUS are the Infrastructure Nobody Can Ignore

The importance of OpNode needs to be better understood. So we need to zoom out. There are exactly three industries that drive the demand.

Whether from chatGPT to image generators, every AI breakthrough that we’ve heard of rests on GPU heavy training runs. You need tens of thousands of GPU running for months to train GPT-4. Though, using the model after training is less demanding. Still, significant GPU horsepower is still needed at scale.

The more GPU stays centralized and expensive, the more likely we create an AI ecosystem where only the wealthiest players can innovate. There is a chance that there is democratized access by decentralized networks, which will ensure that small labs and independent developers aren’t priced out.

Even milliseconds are money in trading. For high frequency trading firms and algorithmic strategies which are needed to crunch data, or even simulate scenarios, and adapt instantly to market shifts. Scaling headache, costs, latency are all introduced by traditional GPU. Optimizing for speed and distribution across regions for OpNode, could provide traders with on demand low latency compute without the clouds price tag.

There is a promise by web3 that goes from decentralized apps to metaverse platforms, which will often stall on infrastructure bottlenecks. They are like, when you run large scale simulations, or a powered AI driven smart contracts, or even Enabling real time graphics, which all depend on GPUs. There is a risk of repeating some dependencies that web3 was supposed to move from, if these apps must rely on decentralized cloud GPUs. There is a natural fit of the OpNode layer in the ethos of blockchain. Which is distributed, permission less, and resilient.

The Tipping Point is near

As history has been proving right countlessly, when industries are addicted to speed and scale embraces whatever infrastructure that makes growth possible. Broadband becoming cheap was the after effect of the internet explosion. Even as provisioning servers became painless, cloud computing took off.

This is the same point with the GPUs. It’s actually now when, not if decentralized compute will matter. The timing couldn’t get any better. As AI workloads are exploding, huger increases for efficiency in financial firms, even the boundaries of decentralized apps are pushed by web3, there is now higher demand for affordable, distributed GPU access such as OpNode.

The headline may not be grabbed by OpNode, like they do for new AI models or flashy trading strategies. But let’s make no mistake, what we’ve missed is it as the backbone. So as this layer solidifies, individual industries won’t just be accelerated, and we can count on the entire digital economy being sped up.