Akash Support Services - Q3 2025 - Funding Proposal

[lechenghiskhan]

Motivation

The Overclock Labs Core Team is submitting this proposal to secure funding for the ongoing support and maintenance required to sustain Akash Network's core operations that extend beyond specific development initiatives. While some requests support defined programs such as Provider Incentive Pilots (PIPs), others provide foundational support across multiple programs and network-wide activities, including Community Support and Events Proposals.

This proposal details essential support services performed by Overclock Labs that directly enhance the stability, scalability, and growth of the Akash Network. These services are grouped into distinct programs and cost centers described in the following sections.

Total Costs

For AEP Support Services, Overclock Labs will request $985,197.09 from the Community Pool covering labor and operating costs directly attributable to the support service efforts.

	Request from CP
Estimated engineering hours	2,028.00
Engineering rate per hour	$124.19
Engineering total cost	$251,853.85
Estimated support hours	1,060.57
Support rate per hour	$193.66
Support total cost	$205,390.34
Labor Subtotal	$457,244.20
Additional Operating Support Costs*	$244,402.85
AKT Volatility Buffer (40.412%)**	$283,550.05
Grand Total	$985,197.09

	Hours	Cost
Client Enhancements & Support	156.00	$ 33,301.62
As a percentage of total labor budget	5.05%	7.28%
Core Support	182.00	$ 33,666.34
As a percentage of total labor budget	5.89%	7.36%
Provider Support	884.00	$ 126,948.39
As a percentage of total labor budget	28.62%	27.76%
Administrative Support	332.57	$ 71,932.57
As a percentage of total labor budget	10.77%	15.73%
Community Support	728.00	$ 133,457.77
As a percentage of total labor budget	23.57%	29.19%
AkashChat Operating & Development	806.00	$ 57,937.50
As a percentage of total labor budget	26.10%	12.67%

*Additional Operating Support Costs

Represent recurring or semi-recurring expenditures that support the administration, coordination, and continuity of Akash Network operations across fiscal periods. They include professional services, software subscriptions, compliance support, and financial operations essential to sustain on-chain governance, accounting, engineering, and client-facing functions. This amount also includes infrastructure costs associated with running AkashChat.

**AKT volatility buffer

This buffer accounts for the historical daily volatility of AKT measured over a period of 28 days. By providing a more substantial buffer against potential downswings in AKT, we mitigate the need to request any budget shortfalls through subsequent proposals. In the event of excess funds above the US dollar amount for labor, taxes, and overage, all remaining AKT will be promptly returned to the community.

Supported Programs

Deploy Console Enhancements and Support

The Akash Deployer Console is the centerpiece of the Akash Network user experience. As this application grows, its infrastructure, backend, and other ancillary areas also require additional resources for support. These include, but are not limited to:

1. Infrastructure support: Facilitate scaling, redundancy, uptime, and general performance.
2. Observability: Ensuring Akash Network customers have the necessary tools to effectively troubleshoot and manage their workloads.
3. Analytics: Ensure business insights and intelligence are captured to ultimately create a feedback loop to drive enhancements in the Console while building attribution that allows the Core Team to assess the efficacy of paid user acquisition strategies.

DevOps and Provider Enhancement Support

Akash Console is now the Network’s native provider management platform with a fully native experience for our providers. Scaling and managing providers without handholding, thus unlocking the ability to scale the provider base. Furthermore, Provider Incentive Pilots 1, 2, and 3 required the services of a Pilot Program Administrator (PPA) to administer, maintain, and report for the programs. The preponderance of these resources is allocated towards technical administration via the Core Team’s DevOps function to facilitate:

1. Technical administration, technical support, and troubleshooting for PIP providers.
2. Management of a Sandbox environment for testing and exploration.
3. Technical support and troubleshooting for clients who encounter issues with PIP providers.
4. Prepare and maintain technical documentation and support for community providers.
5. Solving open issues related to Provider Console from Console repo, Discord, and elsewhere from the Community and users.
6. Support the Akash Network during network upgrades, helping ensure that providers are upgraded quickly.
7. Closely collaborating with providers who are testing functionality and troubleshooting.

Core Technical Support

The Akash Network’s core codebase is the single largest repository of the Network and requires immense management and support. This spans across core development and support efforts, as well as helping community members, integration partners, and other clients or projects. These include, but are not limited to: \

1. Managing and paying for testing and staging instances across the entire core and client engineering teams.
2. Research and Development efforts undertaken to assess the viability of initiatives before they become the Akash Enhancement Proposals on the roadmap.
3. Providing AEP review and feedback at scale to ensure community resources are appropriately allocated and focused, which includes activities such as
   1. Reviewing demos
   2. Reviewing discussions publicly and privately
   3. Reviewing code publicly and privately

Administrative and Community Support

Administration and support for the entire open-source and open-management framework of Akash Network is a massive undertaking that requires community organization, development and management of frameworks and services, and coordination of inputs between the community and the Akash Core Team, among numerous other functions. Some of these include:

1. SIG, Working Group, and User Group administration, program management, and hosting support. See discussion links here.
2. Community development that touches everything from insider office hours to Akash EDU programs.
3. Event management for Akash Network events, encompassing research, planning, and execution.
4. Brand management, such as social media management and engagement, swag design, and booth design and execution.

In addition, administrative FinOps functions play a critical role in managing the financial operations of the network, ensuring transparent tracking of expenditures, and aligning spending with community objectives. These functions include budgeting, forecasting, cost optimization, and financial reporting to maintain accountability and efficiency across all administrative and community initiatives.

Together, these administrative and community functions form the operational backbone of Akash Network, ensuring efficient management and long-term sustainability. In total, the combined administrative, community, and FinOps efforts represent more than half of the overall labor budget, reflecting the substantial investment in operational coordination and financial governance.

AkashChat Support

The Akash ecosystem continues to evolve rapidly, and a key part of that growth is the deployment and scaling of community-first tools that drive real-world utility, visibility, and long-term engagement. AkashChat and AkashGen are powerful tools that serve as on-ramps for both developers and users who want to leverage decentralized infrastructure for AI and generative services. These tools are already being used frequently, and the demand has only grown as we press on through Q4 2025.

Current models supported on AkashChat:

• Qwen3 Next 80B A3B
• DeepSeek V3.1
• GPT-OSS-120B
• Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct 2507
• Llama 4 Maverick 17B 128E
• Llama 3.3 70B

We are at an AI model inflection point, where new open source models are matching or exceeding their closed source counterparts. Demand is rapidly shifting toward self-hosted and sovereign AI, as enterprises look for lower costs, stronger data control, and freedom from the lock-in and policy risk of closed, centralized providers. Akash is uniquely positioned to serve this new wave: our decentralized marketplace aggregates global GPU supply, driving down inference costs while giving developers censorship-resistant, location-flexible infrastructure for running top-tier open models.

Total demand for AkashChat has risen drastically since the prior funding request discussed here. For Q3 2025, Overclock Labs has funded **$153,066 towards AkashChat usage. Furthermore, Overclock Labs anticipates monthly usage to exceed $100,000 a month **in Q4 2025 leading into Q1 2026. Support from the Akash Community Pool for this work ensures that the Akash ecosystem continues to evolve with high-demand, developer- and user-facing tools that lower the barrier to entry for decentralized computing, particularly in AI and generative services.

Limited Market Impact & Transparent Reporting

Limited Market Impact

Overclock Labs will custody the requested funds in a new, distinct wallet so that funds from any other source are not commingled.

All funds will be liquidated and managed in a manner that ensures minimal impact on the market. These funds will be handled with the same care and attention as all previous Community Funding Proposals, with liquidations done in a fashion that will not adversely affect the market. In practice, the effort of this liquidation will add depth to the AKT market for buyers looking to enter.

In some cases, the Overclock Labs will use structured market-making (MM) activity to manage funds responsibly. Conversions will take place gradually over defined trading windows rather than through large sell transactions. Spreading activity over these longer windows helps ensure that each trade reduces the likelihood of noticeable price movements and helps maintain a stable market for all participants. This measured approach allows the Overclock Labs to meet operational needs while minimizing market impact and supporting steady liquidity within the AKT ecosystem.

Please feel free to share any thoughts, questions or other feedback in this discussion thread.