Original｜Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
At the crossroads of cryptocurrency and AI, crypto mining companies and computing power networks have become the greatest common denominator.
On November 28, crypto mining company Bitfury Group (which includes two major publicly listed mining companies in the U.S., Cipher Mining and Hut8) announced a strategic investment of $12 million in the decentralized AI computing network Gonka.ai in the form of a Token Fund. Just a few days later, on December 2, Bitfury's Vice Chairman George Kikvadze officially announced an increased investment in Gonka, raising the total investment to $50 million, marking the company's largest investment in decentralized artificial intelligence computing to date. Moreover, he praised Gonka's architecture as representing the "Bitcoin moment" in the AI field and published a long article to elaborate on this viewpoint.
As a result, this decentralized GPU computing power market, founded by the Lieberman brothers who span both Web2 and Web3 fields, has gained significant attention. The reason is simple: this investment is the first public investment following Bitfury's establishment of a $1 billion AI fund. This also indicates that traditional mining companies are not only extending their reach into the booming territory of AI models and internet giants but are also systematically laying out the decentralized AI infrastructure track.
According to the latest data, Gonka.ai's computing power has grown to over 6,300 H100 GPU equivalent computing power, supporting nearly 20 mainstream AI devices including 3080, 4090, H100, and H200. Its distributed computing power cluster is expected to break the monopoly of Nvidia and major cloud service providers, significantly reducing AI development costs. In this arms race based on computing power, what role will Gonka.ai play? What returns can it bring to the market? With these questions in mind, Odaily Planet Daily will provide a detailed interpretation of its profound background, real business, and mining incentives in this article.
Gonka's Great Vision: Solving the AI Computing Power Dilemma and Inference Bottleneck with a Decentralized Computing Power Network
According to official white paper information and official information, Gonka's mainnet, which focuses on the concept of "decentralized AI network," officially launched in September this year. This network adopts a permissionless design, allowing all hardware owners (i.e., GPU and other computing power devices) to connect instantly and earn profits. To incentivize early adopters, Gonka has established a six-month "grace period" during which AI inference services are completely free. At the same time, GNK tokens will be distributed daily as rewards to early contributors.
Unlike other centralized or decentralized computing power networks, Gonka, which pursues extreme efficiency and technical balance, is committed to directing nearly 100% of GPU computing power towards meaningful AI training and inference tasks, rather than wasting computing power on buying, selling, and transferring processes, thus addressing the issue of computing power waste to some extent.
The key reason it can achieve this is the strong support from the experienced team behind Gonka and its impressive investment institutions.
Two Major Development Pillars of Gonka.ai: Internet Veterans with Over a Decade of Experience and Elite Investment Institutions Investing $40 Million
Public information shows that Gonka is incubated by the American AI developer Product Science Inc., founded by seasoned professionals from the Web2 industry, including the former core product director of the well-known American internet platform Snap Inc., the Lieberman siblings. Since 2021, its AI service clients have included globally recognized companies such as Walmart, the largest employer in the U.S., JP Morgan Chase, the largest bank in the world, and tech giant Airbnb.
Behind Product Science is the Lieberman family's innovative venture capital studio, Liebermans Co—an internet venture capital firm that has attracted the attention of "investment veterans" including a16z founder Marc Andreessen and partner Chris Dixon, OpenAI investor Coatue Management leader Arielle Zuckerberg, Josh Kushner, Notion founder Akshay Kothary, and Slow Ventures.
Based on its mature customer service system and impressive professional background, Product Science, led by the Lieberman siblings (David Liberman, Daniil Liberman, Anna Liberman, and Masha Liberman), has been sailing smoothly in the U.S. venture capital scene.
It is reported that Product Science raised $18 million in 2023, with a valuation of $200 million, with investors including OpenAI investor Coatue Management, Solana investor Slow Ventures, K5, Insight, and Benchmark partners, among other prestigious teams. Early contributors to the project also include well-known leading companies in the Web 2-Web 3 field such as 6 blocks, Hard Yaka, Gcore, and Bitfury.
Based on the latest round of financing information, we need to elaborate on Bitfury, the latest investor in Gonka—this mining giant includes two major publicly listed mining companies in the U.S., Cipher Mining (with a market value of about $7.2 billion) and Hut 8 (with a market value of about $4.5 billion), making it a "super $10 billion market value giant among crypto mining companies." In addition to its significant position in the crypto mining industry, it has also co-founded AI infrastructure company LiquidStack and AI hardware and software design company Axelera AI, making it a "big player" that excels in both "Crypto+AI."
Now, Bitfury has subscribed to 20 million Gonka ecosystem tokens GNK at a price of $0.6 per token, achieving its strategic investment in the decentralized AI computing power network. This is also the first large investment after Bitfury announced the launch of a $1 billion investment plan focusing on ethical technology and AI innovation, highlighting its emphasis on Gonka. The recent increase in investment amount to $50 million also reflects its ambitious plans in the AI decentralized computing power network.
It is not an exaggeration to say that in the keenly aware U.S. investment circle and crypto mining circle, Gonka has already become the "best choice" among decentralized computing power network projects, thanks to its unique industry ecological niche and rapidly growing real business data.
According to the Gonka miner data dashboard, the Gonka network currently has 626 active nodes globally, with 1,314 participants in the AI inference network, and the total network computing power reaches 5,854.9 H100 equivalent GPUs, with previous data exceeding 6,300 H100 equivalent computing power.
Moreover, Gonka's GPU computing power network is rapidly increasing at a monthly growth rate of about 50%. It must be said that once the computing power network leveraging the advantages of decentralization starts operating, its growth rate is astonishing.
As mentioned earlier, Gonka aims to solve the AI computing power and inference challenges with a decentralized computing power network, introducing the new role of AI miners to address industry-level issues such as insufficient computing power, waste of computing power, and idle computing power. With a certain scale effect, Gonka's computing power network is also expected to break the monopoly of traditional centralized tech companies like Nvidia and Google.
A Computing Power Network Focused on AI Inference: Gonka's Unique Industry Ecological Niche
In the context of the crypto industry, Gonka's development prospects are equally promising. For reference, we have selected the following projects for a brief comparative introduction:
- The decentralized machine learning network Bittensor (TAO) currently has over 12,000 GPUs, focusing more on model collaboration rather than pure computing rental; the project's market value is approximately $3.14 billion.
- The decentralized GPU rendering and computing market Render Network supports AI graphics and video tasks, sharing GPU resources but focusing on rendering, with $30 million raised in 2024.
- In October this year, Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced the launch of a decentralized AI computing network called Cocoon, where GPU miners will receive Toncoin (TON) rewards, emphasizing data privacy and integrating Telegram's 1 billion users. It officially launched its mainnet on December 1, but its GPU computing power is still under development.
- Aethir, a leading project in the DePIN computing track, achieved revenue of $39.8 million in the third quarter of 2025, with an annual recurring revenue (ARR) exceeding $147 million. Recent news shows that Aethir has deployed over 435,000 enterprise-level GPU containers (covering H100, B200, etc.), delivering over 1.4 billion hours of AI computing services, with enterprise users including Kluster.ai and Attentions.ai, focusing more on enterprise-level computing power needs.
In comparison to the above projects, Gonka aims for a more inclusive, intuitive, and broader AI inference training for individual users and AI companies.
Its main advantages lie in the following four aspects:
1. Rapidly growing AI computing power network;
2. Supporting the development of real AI model inference;
3. Low-threshold mining incentives for AI miners;
4. Fair distribution and long-term incentives of the ecological token GNK.
Regarding the specific participation methods for mining in the Gonka AI computing power network, which can provide direct economic incentives for network participants, we will elaborate in the following sections.
Gonka Sparks the "AI Mining Craze": Enabling AI Computing Power Miners to Get Rich First
In a previous article titled “Gonka Reward Mechanism Explained: How to Become a Top AI Miner?” released by Gonka, we can see in detail that the backbone of Gonka's development mainly comes from the computing power contributed by "AI miners." In return, Gonka offers three types of rewards, including work tokens, incentive tokens, and top miner incentives. The specific types are categorized as follows:
- Work tokens can be understood as immediate earnings, derived from user payments for AI task fees, distributed based on computing power contribution ratio × quality score, with a linear release over 180 days (approximately 0.56% released daily);
- Incentive tokens are long-term incentives for network development, minted according to the Epoch cycle, with a distribution formula following the mechanism of "miner reward = total pool × (PoC weight / total network weight)," also released linearly over 180 days (approximately 0.56% released daily);
- Top miner incentives are only available to the top 5% of miners, who can receive additional GNK tokens, with evaluation dimensions including computing power stability (uptime > 95%), model diversity (supporting all governance models), task completion rate (> 90%), and reputation score (community recognition).
The specific operational process behind the reward incentives is illustrated in the diagram below:
In simple terms, the Gonka computing power network operates under a POW 2.0 incentive mechanism based on a Sprint competition mechanism, using this as proof of work to issue token incentives to corresponding miners. This mechanism can flexibly and directly reflect miners' current computing power contributions, reward incentives, and token releases. Daily dynamic change data can be viewed on the Gonka miner data dashboard.
According to existing information, the AI models supported by the Gonka network mainly include Qwen/Qwen3 and Qwen/Qwen 2.5, with plans to support over 20 mainstream AI model trainings such as Llama and Stable Diffusion in the future; each GNK token anchors the right to use 1 hour of H100 equivalent computing power. More information about the operation and deployment of Gonka mining software can be found here.
Finally, considering Gonka's halving mechanism, its first halving cycle (4 years) will cumulatively distribute nearly 50% of the GNK tokens, with the first year (i.e., Epoch 0-365 phase) seeing a total issuance of 95.6 million GNK tokens, marking a rare "early participation, early returns" golden participation period.
Detailed Explanation of Gonka's Ecological Token Economic Model: Total Supply of 1 Billion, Community Pool Allocation of 120 Million
According to the official economic model document, the total supply of Gonka's ecological token GNK is fixed at 1 billion tokens, with specific allocation information as follows:
- Total token supply: 1 billion GNK, of which:
- Community pool incentive share: 120 million GNK
- Founding team incentive share: 200 million GNK, accounting for 20% of total FDV (not to be sold within four years)
- Core incentive share: 680 million GNK, used for reward incentives for computing power network participation.
According to the official explanation, the Gonka project is fairly decentralized, and the only way to obtain GNK tokens is to provide GPU computing power (mining) for the Gonka network or purchase from the community pool at a pre-set joint curve sale ratio.
As for the 20% of tokens allocated to the founding team, they mainly belong to the early developers of Product Science, and the founders have previously committed to a lock-up period of up to 4 years.
In previous community AMAs, the founding team specifically addressed various major questions of concern to the community, including explanations of the token distribution mechanism, community public offerings, training fund tax rates, and the reward distribution mechanism based on effort, mentioning that:
The collateral in the Gonka network itself will not bring any rewards to miners; miners' voting rights and incentive shares can only be obtained by contributing more computing power. Gonka is a purely proof-of-work (PoW) network, without any proof-of-stake (PoS) components, aimed at rewarding participants who build infrastructure;
The token sale will be initiated and defined by the Gonka community, providing all users with equal purchasing opportunities;
Regarding the "20% training fund mandatory tax rate" mentioned in the token economics document, this is merely a long-term vision, and the specific "tax rate ratio" will be determined by the miner community. In the early stages of Gonka's network development, the contribution ratio for the training fund is set at 0%, and the community will decide whether to increase this ratio based on the activities and achievements of the research community, with the ultimate goal of ensuring that Gonka can compete with top centralized AI companies and attract capital to train its own models.
Unlike the Bittensor network, where 10% of TAO token rewards flow to subnet owners and 45% to stakers, while the Subnet 64 (Chutes) hardware providers, who contributed the most Nvidia GPUs, only receive 5% of the network token incentives, Gonka allocates 68% of the token share to computing power contributors, demonstrating its friendly attitude towards computing power miners and fairness to the community.
Additionally, in light of the earlier information about "Bitfury investing $12 million in Gonka," the current valuation of the Gonka project is only $600 million. Although this is calculated based on a small token share (2%), Gonka's official stance remains clear: all raised funds will be managed by the community to support developer incentives, rewards, and project ecological construction.
As a decentralized AI computing power network, Gonka knows that its greatest advantage lies in the thousands and tens of thousands of computing power miners.
Conclusion: AI Miners Will Become Mainstream, and Gonka Takes the Lead
Gonka launched its mainnet in September this year, and in less than three months, its computing power resources have grown to nearly 6,000 H100 equivalent computing power. Additionally, the official previously launched a “10 Million GNK Token Incentive Program” to support developers in building the ecosystem from three major directions: core technology, infrastructure, and ecological security.
As Nvidia dominates the market with its Blackwell chips, achieving quarterly profits exceeding $56 billion; Google releases Ironwood TPU in hopes of breaking Nvidia's monopoly; and even Amazon joins the brutal arms race for AI computing resources with its Trainium3 chips, Gonka's existence opens a door for us to transition from GPU feudalism to an era of AI inclusivity.
In a sense, Gonka is not just a decentralized AI computing power network; it is also a computational profit distribution scheme that promotes the efficient operation of AI inference and training while returning benefits to participants. This is precisely what distinguishes it from traditional graphics card suppliers, centralized tech giants, and crypto mining companies. Facing the "new wealth mine" of AI, backed by a mature team, strong capital, and a commitment to "standing with the community," Gonka has already carved out its own "gold mining path" with a momentum of accumulated strength.
In the near future, AI miners will become another influential industry role following crypto miners, and the development of Gonka is undoubtedly equally anticipated.
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