RNDR Knowledge Base
The RNDR Network is a high-performance distributed GPU rendering network that leverages industry-leading OTOY Inc. software to facilitate a compute marketplace between GPU Providers and GPU Requestors.
First conceived in 2009 by OTOY, inc. Founder and CEO Jules Urbach, RNDR held its first public token sale in October 2017, entering into a private sale period from January - May 2018. During the private sale, early adopters were onboarded onto the RNDR Beta Testnet, where Beta Node Operators and Beta Creators worked together with the RNDR team to build out and test the network. RNDR launched publicly on April 27th 2020.
Backed by parent company OTOY, Inc., the RNDR Team is based out of Los Angeles, CA, with team members located all over the globe. With a world class advisory board boasting industry leaders such as Ari Emmanuel (Co-Founder and Co-CEO, WME), JJ Abrams (Chairman and CEO, Bad Robot Productions), and Brendan Eich (Founder and CEO, Brave Software and BAT), RNDR aims to bridge the gap between the graphics present and the virtual future.
RNDR gives GPU owners an opportunity to monetize otherwise idle GPUs by offering their compute power to creators in search of rendering resources. In short, RNDR allows GPU owners to loan out their GPU power to creators in need of additional power.
Inspired by the book Life After Television (written in 1990 by OTOY Advisor Board member George Gilder), Jules Urbach laid out his vision for the future in Life After Automation: The Rendering Economy:
“A first principle in the “Render Economy” is that the resonance of authentic human thought, creativity and imagination are the fundamental units of currency"
"Our complete personal experience is a uniquely human metric by which we constantly measure qualia, social resonance and novel truths. No machine can ever do this more authentically and meaningfully than we do. In a decentralized, dematerialized and fully automated world, the flow and final evaluation of human value must never stop being a human responsibility.”
“The Render Token and the network that it encompasses are built to enable such a system’s viability as early as possible. First, through massive cost savings in distributed rendering that bootstrap the render economy in its early stages. Then, in subsequent phases to come, through a semantic web of value and authorship encoded in the blockchain itself.”
Echoing that same vision for the future, Ari Emanuel (Co-CEO of Endeavor and OTOY and RNDR Advisor Board member) penned in his piece This is Life After Television how RNDR plans to help make this future dream a reality:
“Since then, Jules and I have been building a system for the future. It will all be built on RNDR. We have lined up and signed deals with all of the major media companies from Disney and HBO to Facebook and Unity. LightStages will be built at our WME offices for blockchain based scans of all our clients and athletes. I am driving media to go through the Render Token network.” - Ari Emanuel
Expanding on his vision, Jules wrote A Photon Driven Economy as an example of how RNDR<->BAT could interact and work together. The RNDR token will allow for cross-token development and services across multiple fronts (BAT, Sia, etc.)
“The Internet was built on the promise of distributed computing and the open exchange of ideas and data. As we move from hypertext and hypermedia to a fully immersive metaverse built on complex interactive 3D scenes, the challenges and opportunities are exponentially greater.”
“The RNDR Token, powered by the blockchain, uses the act of creation — rendered by the laws of physics and light — to open the door to a new model of value exchange and a truly decentralized Metaverse.”
Co-creator of Basic Attention Token (BAT), JavaScript creator, co-founder of Mozilla, and also OTOY and RNDR Advisor Board member, Brendan Eich wrote in his blog post "The Render Token":
"Large shared AR/VR worlds cannot possibly “encrypt what you see” (as DRM for fixed media tries to do). Yet creators of models and art in such shared virtual worlds need effective and fair protection, as experience from Second Life shows.
Indelible watermarking is a key part of the solution. [..]
I’m honored to be an advisor to OTOY and RNDR. I’m thrilled by the prospects for RNDR, BAT, and other domain-specific tokens that will bind the Metaverse economy into a coherent and equitable, yet decentralized, whole. The future will be tokenized!" - Brendan Eich
This vision of a truly decentralized and open Metaverse is what has connected OTOY with many other leaders in the 3D and entertainment industry, including Star Wars director and OTOY and RNDR Advisor Board member J.J. Abrams:
“As technology continues to become democratized — including the sort of remarkable results you can get with Octane — more diverse and unique stories will be told. Worlds, familiar and extraordinary, will be created and distributed in ways that could not have been imagined a decade ago. ” - J.J. Abrams
Across the Gaming and Virtual Reality industries, pioneers such as Tim Sweeny (CEO of Epic Games) and John Carmack (Developer of Doom/Quake, Former CTO of Facebook Oculus VR) have publicly pushed for the creation of a Metaverse similar to Jules' vision, as described in a 2017 story about Jules Urbach’s Quest To Realize Star Trek’s Holodeck.
“OTOY is juggling a lot of widely different tech, but if you squint at it right, there are a lot of pieces that fit together in a particular vision of the future.” - John Carmack
December 2020: RNDR 2020 End of Year Update
October 2020: OTOY GTC 2020 Fall Presentation. RNDR starting at 19:00
July 2020 RNDR 2020 First Half Update
April 2020: OTOY GTC 2020 Presentation. RNDR starting at 25:25
Website: https://rendertoken.com
Reddit: r/RenderToken
Medium: https://medium.com/@rendertoken
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rendertoken
Telegram: https://t.me/s/rendertoken
Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/F4WENTG (#rndr-chat)
