Akash Migrates 300 Million Tokens from Cosmos to Solana in Major Shift

Author: David, Shenchao TechFlow

DeepChain Summary: As one of the earliest standout application chains in the Cosmos ecosystem, the decentralized compute marketplace Akash is undergoing a significant self-rescue and restructuring. This long-standing project has realized that the cost of maintaining an independent blockchain is hindering the expansion of its compute services. The Proposal 346, launched on October 26, showed over 98% of votes in favor of abandoning its sovereign chain and migrating both its token and protocol entirely to Solana. After accounting for its infrastructure costs, the project is making tough cuts to pursue genuine business growth.

Do you remember Akash, the established DePIN project from the Cosmos ecosystem?

As of October 27, Governance Proposal 346 regarding the Akash protocol migration received 98.42% in favor. The voting rate exceeded 50%, far surpassing the quorum threshold.

Although the voting window will remain open until November 2, Akash founder Greg Osuri has publicly confirmed that the migration is finalized.

For this long-standing project rooted in the Cosmos ecosystem, abandoning the akashnet-2 sovereign chain is a strategic move to cut losses. Under a clear compute business model, the former narrative advantages of "appchains" have become tangible financial and operational burdens.

The Akash team presented a clear economic account in the official blog.

Under the existing Cosmos architecture, Akash operates its own independent sovereign chain. Currently, around 100 validators stake a significant amount of AKT tokens, but the sole purpose of this capital is to secure the network’s consensus safety, providing no direct business benefits to buyers or sellers in the compute marketplace.

At the same time, the core development team must manually maintain forked versions of cosmos-sdk and CometBFT over the long term and coordinate node upgrades across the entire network.

As a pure compute rental marketplace, Akash’s order and settlement mechanisms do not require deep underlying customization.

Through the AEP-79 proposal initiated in 2025, the team evaluated several options, including retaining the sovereign chain, transitioning to an Ethereum L2, or moving to the Solana mainnet. Final data comparisons showed that if the business were restructured as a native program on Solana, the daily network fees for the entire compute market would be just 0.075 SOL (approximately a few dollars).

By relinquishing control over the consensus mechanism, Akash can directly shed millions of dollars in capital lockup and high development costs, focusing resources on winning real customers in the AI compute market.

To achieve this "self-rescue," Akash designed a one-way migration path with high friction.

According to the proposal details, within two to three weeks after Proposal 346 is approved, AKT that has completed the security audit will be launched on Solana as a native SPL token, and a one-way migration portal will be opened for a period of two years.

This is an irreversible process.

Once holders transfer AKT from Cosmos to Solana (maintaining a 1:1 exchange rate and six decimal places), there is no way to reverse the transaction.

This phased migration mechanism has drawn objections from some legacy chain maintainers. The node cosmosrescue, with 0.63% of voting power, voted against it, highlighting a misalignment in the design: Proposal 346 requires token holders to migrate their assets as soon as the one-way gate opens, but the official cutover of the compute market code still awaits another vote months later. Key rules—including how unmigrated tokens will be handled after the legacy chain is shut down and the new chain’s emission curve—remain unresolved during this window.

Meanwhile, for the 100 validators maintaining the old chain, their lifecycle has been put on a countdown. Ninety days after the market ultimately switches, the old chain will be permanently halted, and the validator roles and staking rewards will cease.

Akash's migration is a microcosm of the broader restructuring of legacy Web3 infrastructure.

In the 2026 assessment, the Akash team explicitly ruled out remaining within the Cosmos ecosystem due to liquidity and clustering effects. The Cosmos ecosystem is experiencing significant outflows of capital and projects: the native stablecoin chain Noble departed in March of this year, and projects such as DATA Network have migrated to Sui due to the high costs of maintaining independent chains.

In contrast, Solana has substantially taken over the leading DePIN networks.

Helium shut down its own chain and completed its migration in 2023, followed by the launch of projects like Render and io.net, with a combined valuation exceeding $3.5 billion, on Solana. For compute projects like Akash that require frequent billing, Solana offers a $15 billion stablecoin supply and over 2.2 million active paying users daily—essential clearing channels for accessing institutional capital (such as BlackRock’s BUIDL) and expanding enterprise customer bases.

The transformation of legacy projects often comes with the burden of a heavy history.

Akash left with nearly 300 million tokens from its former home, validating a maturing business logic. When real growth is needed, moving to a shared public chain base with low marginal costs and deep stablecoin liquidity holds far greater survival value than maintaining an expensive independent chain.

With the underlying switch, the circulation path and staking rules for nearly 300 million AKT will undergo fundamental changes. The proposal outlines the following operational mechanisms and restrictions:

1:1 One-way Exchange: Within 2 to 3 weeks after proposal approval, the official cross-chain portal will launch (2-year window). AKT will be issued on Solana as an SPL token (ticker and six decimal places remain unchanged). The migration is one-way and irreversible; AKT sent to Solana will be removed from circulation on Cosmos and cannot be returned under any circumstances.

Unstaking (21-day lock-up period): Stakers must first initiate unstaking, which takes 21 days. The official portal supports initiating unstaking and queuing cross-chain transfer in a single transaction. Until the official算力 market cutover, staked assets remaining on the old chain will continue to generate rewards.

Zero friction vs. custody differences: Users of self-custody wallets must connect both ends of the address via the official portal to complete cross-chain transfers; the official platform will provide a fee-sponsored relayer (no SOL purchase required in advance). Centralized exchanges will handle this automatically in the background, requiring no manual action from users.

Highest security threat: The official team has clearly stated that phishing websites targeting cross-chain authorization pose the highest risk; users must wait for the official channel to announce the sole Portal domain name.