KuCoin AMA With Render Token $RNDR — Creating A Much More Efficient, Powerful, and Widely-Scalable Computer Graphics Rendering Network

Dear KuCoin Users,

Time: May 14, 2021, 13:00-14:27 (UTC)

KuCoin hosted an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) session with Render Token’s Project Lead, Joshua Bijak, in the KuCoin Exchange Group.

RenderToken.com (RNDR®) is a high-performance distributed GPU rendering network built on OctaneRender®, the world’s first and fastest GPU-accelerated, unbiased, physically correct renderer by OTOY Inc. The network facilitates a compute and virtual asset (NFT) marketplace between Node Operators and Requestors.

OTOY’s Academy Award®-winning technology is used by leading visual effects studios, artists, animators, designers, architects, and engineers, providing unprecedented creative freedom, new levels of realism, and new economics in content creation and distribution powered by the cloud.

OTOY® was founded in 2008. Since then, the company has grown to over 60 employees across four offices with headquarters in Los Angeles, California. RNDR held its public token sale in October 2017. The RNDR network launched and has been fully operational since April 2020.

Official Website: https://rendertoken.com

RNDR Knowledge Base: https://know.rendertoken.com

Follow Render Token on Twitter and Telegram.

Guest:

Joshua Bijak — Render Token’s Project Lead

Joshua worked on IoT systems in the oil and gas sector and got deeply intrigued with the possibilities of blockchain in 2017 when he had been crypto mining for about a couple years already. He has worked as a software engineer for eight years, and five years as a CTO for blockchain companies. He built one of the first on-chain carbon offset systems on Ethereum and contributed to the infrastructure on Polygon/Matic where he deployed GSNv1 and now deploying GSNv2. In his role he manages RNDR’s timeline, budget and stakeholder relations.

Joshua: Hello everyone! Thanks for having me here today!

Q: Can you please introduce yourself and your background and what you do at RNDR?

Joshua: I am an electrical/environmental engineer by trade who somehow ended up in the crypto space about 5 years ago. I used to work on IoT systems in the oil and gas sector but then I got deeply intrigued with the possibilities of blockchain in 2017, at this point I had been mining for about a couple years already.

I've built all sorts of MVPs all the way to production-grade products that are in use today in Ethereum and web3.

My role on RNDR is to help bring RNDR from the 2018 era of web3 they were into the 2021 web3 era. I got brought on in October 2020 as part of an expansion and pursuit into more growth for the project.

Since then I have helped implement Layer 2 and many other scaling improvements. Looking forward we are going to continue this for the rest of the year. Scaling more and more to make RNDR bigger and better than ever.

Q: What is RNDR, tell us about what the network does, and how it works?

Joshua: RNDR is a decentralized VFX rendering network. Artists and creators from anywhere around the world can use this network to render their creations in a fraction of the time, cost and without spending money on costly hardware. It allows for anyone to have the power of limitless creativity at the touch of a button.

The entire network is based on a renderer known in the Hollywood VFX space as OctaneRender, RNDR is the decentralized distributed version of it that allows for this super speed rendering.

We do so using state-of-the-art tech for distributed GPU compute and that's all built by us. We use the blockchain to coordinate artists and node operators to make sure that operators are paid fairly for their time and so that artists consistently have GPUs available to them.

Q: What problem does RNDR solve?

Joshua: Fundamentally, RNDR solves a coordination problem, and in turn a supply demand problem. It allows for people with various desired hardware resources to work together with market mechanics.

People for the first time ever can essentially rent GPU time from their peers. This also helps address the worldwide GPU shortage that we are seeing today. People can get access to a resource that they really need for their day-to-day work. This also means that by coordinating GPU power this way, we are way more efficient with the hardware we have today.

Q: How does RNDR use blockchain technology?

Joshua: For the last pilot/mainnet release year, RNDR used blockchain to facilitate the payment and registering of jobs on the network between artists and node operators.

This year after seeing network stability, we are starting to expand the ecosystem. Layer 2 was the first step in this. But very soon we will be launching a full suite of NFT tools for creating NFT archives using RNDR. Our first test was with prominent Marvel Comic Book artist Alex Ross and we are continuing to focus on this toolset as we move forward.

Many people might not know this but many many prominent NFT artists today use RNDR/Octane for their artworks. We want to support this by helping build essentially a museum-grade archival system for these works so they don't get lost.

Q: How is RNDR involved in the creation of NFTs?

Joshua: I sorta alluded to this in my previous answer. Haha. So prior to actually creating the NFT onchain itself. The actual underlying artwork or creation is designed and then exported to be rendered.

For those unfamiliar with the process. Think of a design where you film green screen shots in a movie and rendering is the part where they add all CGI parts to it and make it into the epic Marvel or DC superhero movie we all know and love.

For NFT the process is the same, the artists have to export their work and then render it. They can do so either locally which takes forever, or on RNDR which takes a fraction of the time.

Once they have the final production image or movie file. They can take that and then upload that into an NFT on whatever platform they choose. So any NFT you see today on any platform, at some point had to be rendered, and as we are slowly discovering. Most of them were done on RNDR!

Basically we are a core part of the NFT creation process, and want to extend that with the RNDR archive even further.

Jules, our CEO, actually was on CNBC recently talking about this exact thing: https://twitter.com/RenderToken/status/1374122326153965569

Q: What is next on the RNDR Roadmap?

Joshua: What isn't on the roadmap is the better question. Haha we have so much planned and in the works. But I'll keep it brief and high level for now as we will be releasing news about it where you can read all about it.

We have a few key goals for the next 6 months to a year, and then much longer term stuff on the horizon as well.

In the near term, we are focusing on thing and one thing only. Growth and scaling. We just recently did the L2 transition and we are wrapping up the complete transition. We have all the guides in place on our knowledge base and Telegram admins @RenderTokenOfficial and support scaling to assist as well. We want to bring all creators to the network in as many industries as possible.

Which is also our second biggest release now with the support for Ampere Nvidia Cards or 30xx series cards. This also means we will be able to bring other industry renderers to the system now like Autodesk Arnold which is used heavily in construction, automotive and mechanical engineering design.

Part of this plan also includes the NFT archive and tooling around creating this content and preserving it. Hopefully allowing artists to have rock solid bases for their works.

Much longer term, we are looking at building the next era of content creation with things like NFT streaming and render streams.

Q: Who does RNDR partner with, what companies do you work with?

Joshua: We work with many industry leaders and experts in the VFX space. Ranging from Netflix, Marvel to hardware providers like Google and Apple. Very recently we launched OctaneX with Apple on the App Store to get octane in the hands of many more users. On the more blockchain side we are constantly getting requests from more and more artists to work with us and feature suggestions which we listen to and try and incorporate all the time.

Q: Tell us how the Token works? What are the token metrics? How do you make sure the network has long-term value?

Joshua: The RNDR token provides a fixed number of what we call OBh, or OctaneBench Hours. This number is fixed by the tier. Each tier gets its own amount of OBh.

The easiest way to understand OBh is to compare it to electricity. kWh kilowatt hours are a measure of how much electricity you get in 1 hour. OctaneBench is how much OctaneBench power you get in 1 hour. Just like varying types of electricity generation (wind, solar, nuclear, gas, coal) different power cards give different power OBh.

In its current form, the token represents how much rendering power you can get on the network.

We have been working behind the scenes as well on a number of other mechanics that extend the usage of RNDR into more things like NFT and the NFT ecosystem. We will be releasing this new feature set soon after the completion of L2 and other features.

A more detailed explanation of OBh is in the knowledge base as well: https://know.rendertoken.com

Q: How can we become a part of RNDR?

Joshua: Very easily! You can check out the guide in the knowledge base for becoming part of RNDR as either a creator or a node operator!

https://know.rendertoken.com

And if you have any questions that are not answered there we are here in Telegram @RenderTokenOfficial or in the support chat on there.

Q: What are you most excited about with RNDR, NFTs and blockchain in the next few years?

Joshua: Personally, I am most excited to see what non-art-related NFTs can do. I've seen all sorts of implementations already ranging from concert tickets, conference attendance, to things like carbon credits or battle passes in games.

With RNDR I'm stoked to see the next era of creative NFTs. With holographic displays coming soon it'll be cool to see those. Or AR/VR NFTs will also be a really cool thing. There's so much on the horizon that it's really hard to imagine what's going to be created.

Joshua: Wow I'm floored by the responses! Thanks guys. Taking a look now. Will try to also pick questions that will answer multiple people.

Ok lots of great questions.

I'll try to address some broader questions and then grab a few really good ones.

1. So yes we are live today and have been on our mainnet for just over a year now. On rndr.otoy.com. So for those of you asking if we have a product we do and it's live and in use today by many artists.

2. For all the scaling questions about ETH and in general. Yes, we saw that and that's why we implemented layer 2 Polygon so that we can process even more transactions and render jobs and keep costs low for everyone.

3. For those asking about the long-term nature of RNDR. We did our first raise in 2017. So we have already been here for 4 years haha. Safe to say we will be sticking around for a long time.

Q: Are you planning to be a part of the Metaverse?

Joshua: This is a great question and the answer is yes! And in many ways we already are. We have the infrastructure for creating content in the metaverse in greater scale than ever before.

Q: How does Render scale? Are there potential limits? What is the biggest business scaling problem you believe Render Token could face in the future and how will you try to solve it?

Joshua: Another great one.

RNDR scales thanks to OTOY's ORBX file format. This allows to send any 3D scene to any computer worldwide without the need of any software being installed.

The biggest challenge is internet bandwidth to move large amounts of data. Eventually procedural scene descriptions and AI technology for image compression will help to reduce the amount of needed data significantly.

Q: Why does OTOY use GPU-based software to create digital content? How does OctaneRender take advantage of GPU acceleration? How does the Octane work with the graphics card to process photorealistic images fast and how does Octane's parallel computing capabilities work?

Joshua: Also a good question.

Octane is a production rendering path tracer for photo realistic rendering. Traditionally rendering took place on the CPU but GPUs have more parallel execution units. The path tracing computation is rather easy to treat as a parallel workload, this is also the reason why it easily scales up to 17 GPUs in a single system.

Joshua: Couple more broad questions:

1. Yes safety and security is super important, all our contracts were audited and for safety best practices check out the knowledge base know.rendertoken.com to see what is the latest recommendations.

2. For those asking abut the NFT programs, we are working on something for this and more details will be released shortly! The RNDR NFT archive system is the first step in a much broader NFT plan.

Q: Is there anything else you would like to share or you want us to know?

Joshua: Thank you for having me here today.

We posted an infographic in our announcement channel that you guys made.

What is @RenderToken $RNDR

// @Kucoin_Exchange

Anyone who has worked with 3D designs, animation and effects knows how taxing these processes can be on a GPU. Depending on the project, rendering the final project can take hours — or longer. This meant that those who could afford the highest-end technology had the upper hand. However, with the networking potential of the blockchain and cloud, it has become possible to utilize the latent GPU compute power of others to speed up rendering and greatly improve the experience for all.

Render Token set out to democratize this market using its GPU Cloud Rendering Network. The Render Network utilizes blockchain and smart contract technology to bring rendering power to those on the network, creating an economy of connected 3D assets.

Its ERC-20 utility token, RNDR, is available in the KuCoin Spot Market with the following trading pairs:

RNDR/USDT: https://trade.kucoin.com/RNDR-USDT

RNDR/BTC: https://trade.kucoin.com/RNDR-BTC

It answers a lot of the great questions we saw today.

Otherwise make sure to join our Telegram @RenderTokenOfficial and thanks for having me, it was super fun and awesome.

Thank you and thanks everyone who tuned in.

We'll see you in the metaverse.

KuCoin and Render Token have prepared a total of 2,300 RNDR to give away to AMA participants.

1. Red envelope giveaways: 740 RNDR

2. Free-ask section: 60 RNDR

3. Post-AMA activity: 1,500 RNDR

Activity 1 — Quiz: 1,000 RNDR

Activity 2 — Price Guess: 500 RNDR

. . .

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