Nosana

Nosana is a GPU rental marketplace built on Solana. People who need computing power for AI rent graphics cards by the hour from people who own them. The owners, called hosts, are paid in the network's token, NOS.

Nosana describes itself as an open-source GPU cloud for AI inference, which means running a trained model to answer requests. Solana keeps the record of jobs, payments and staking. The AI work itself happens on the hosts' machines. The public marketplace opened on 14 January 2025, and Nosana says it can cost up to six times less than a traditional cloud provider.

How Nosana works: GPU markets, hosts and jobs on Solana

Nosana matches a job to a GPU through on-chain queues called markets. You package your AI workload as a container, pick a market for the type of GPU you want, and a host in that market runs it. Payment sits in an on-chain vault until the job is done.

The Nosana docs define four parts. A job is one run of your workload: a container image, the commands and the hardware it needs. A deployment sits on top and creates jobs over time, so a service can keep running. A GPU market is a pool of similar machines. A host is one GPU machine inside a market.

Markets come in two kinds, Community and Premium, sorted by how far a host has been validated and how well it performs, according to the Nosana glossary.

Four Solana programs do the bookkeeping, per the programs documentation: Jobs, Staking, Rewards and Pools. In the Jobs program, each market sets a job price and a timeout, and holds customer funds in a vault account. A market can also require a host to hold a minimum staking score before it may take work.

Renting GPUs on Nosana: pricing, credits and the deploy dashboard

Renting a GPU on Nosana works on prepaid credits. You sign in to the deploy dashboard with a Google account or a Solana wallet, top up, choose a GPU market and launch a container. A wallet is optional, so you never have to touch crypto to use it.

These were the hourly prices on nosana.com in October 2026:

Nosana lists more than 20 GPU types, plus ready-made templates for common models. The Nosana explorer shows the live price and queue for each market.

You can pay with a card, with USDC or with NOS. A Nosana post from 2 October 2026, The Token Behind the Compute, says card and USDC top-ups are turned into NOS behind the scenes. So you can pay in dollars while hosts are still paid in the token.

You are not tied to the dashboard. There is also a web API, a code library called Nosana Kit, and a command-line tool. Nosana names inference, fine-tuning, image generation, rendering and simulation as jobs the network can run.

Nosana MCP, SSH access and developer tools

Nosana MCP lets an AI coding assistant manage your GPU deployments in plain language. It went live on 29 September 2026 and works with Claude, Codex, Cursor and VS Code. You sign in through your browser, so no API key is needed.

MCP is a standard way for AI tools to talk to outside services. The MCP guide says Nosana's server is built from the same blueprint as its main API. With it, your assistant can list what you have running and check GPU prices. It can also scale a job up, stop it, read its logs and show how many credits you have used.

SSH access followed on 8 October 2026. SSH is a way to log in to a remote machine and type commands. You can connect with a normal SSH program, or open a terminal in the browser with no key setup. The SSH guide notes the limits. You get a live shell only: file copying over scp or sftp and port forwarding are refused.

Two smaller changes came at the same time. The deploy dashboard got a new look in September 2026. A support bot called Nosa went into beta on the Nosana Discord on 6 October 2026.

Hosting a GPU on Nosana: requirements and NOS earnings

Hosting a GPU on Nosana, which some people call Nosana mining, means running Nosana's node software on a Linux PC with a supported NVIDIA card. When a customer's job is assigned to your machine, you earn NOS. No actual mining is involved: you are paid for real AI work.

The host setup guide lists the minimums:

Each PC runs one GPU with its own wallet key, and Nosana is phasing out support for Windows through WSL2. If you game on Windows, the practical route is dual-booting into Ubuntu when the card is free.

Earnings depend on demand for your card. On 17 September 2026 Nosana said demand for RTX 4090 and 5090 cards was outgrowing supply and opened a two-month provider campaign. Eligible hosts that stay online at least 85% of a day are paid as if the card had worked 4.8 hours that day, on top of real job income. Miss the uptime mark and that day's bonus is zero.

NOS token: supply, utility and where it trades

NOS is the Solana token that pays for compute on Nosana. Customers' payments end up in NOS, hosts earn NOS, and holders can stake it to vote on network changes. The supply is capped at 100 million tokens.

About 83.4 million NOS are in circulation, says Nosana's token page. The table shows how the supply was first shared out, as listed in Kraken's asset statement from May 2024.

Nosana's token page names the places where NOS trades. They are Kraken, Crypto.com, Bitvavo, Gate.io, MEXC and BingX, plus Raydium RAY$1.83-1.1% and Jupiter JUP$0.315-1.3% on Solana. Coinbase has a price page for NOS, but it is not on that list.

The token's mint address is nosXBVoaCTtYdLvKY6Csb4AC8JCdQKKAaWYtx2ZMoo7. Check it before any swap, since other tokens use names that look alike.

Nosana staking and the NNP-0001 rewards change

Nosana staking locks your NOS for between 14 days and one year. In return you get a score called xNOS, which grows with the amount and the length of the lock, up to four times your stake at one year. The reward for simply holding a stake is being wound down.

That change comes from NNP-0001, the first Nosana governance proposal. Holders voted from 17 to 21 November 2025, with one NOS counting as one vote, and Nosana reported that it passed "with strong majority support". The vote page does not show the final tally.

The proposal text moves rewards from passive yield to usage. It has three parts:

• Passive staking rewards run for 12 months from 29 November 2025, about 720,000 NOS in total, shrinking over the first six months. After that the pool "decays to zero unless governance explicitly renews it".
• Hosts earn a base reward for uptime, and must hold NOS as collateral that scales with the hourly price of their GPU.
• Customers get 10% of what they spend back as a non-transferable credit called dNOS.

So if you stake NOS only for yield, the scheduled payments end around late November 2026 unless a new vote extends them. We could not confirm from Nosana's host documentation how much of the collateral and rebate design is live yet.

Who Nosana is for

Nosana suits developers and small AI teams who run open models in containers. They get cheap GPU time on demand, with no cloud contract. It also suits people who own a recent NVIDIA card, can run Linux, and accept being paid in a token whose price moves.

Nosana is frank about where it fits less well. Its own guide to GPU clouds says big companies are often better off with AWS, Google Cloud or Azure. Those firms tend to need managed services, buying processes and round-the-clock support. Big training runs that need many linked GPUs are a weaker match too.

For a host, the fit comes down to your card and your uptime. A home RTX card is enough. But you need a Linux install, a steady connection, and patience with income that rises and falls with demand and with the NOS price.

Teams building on the network can apply for a grant of $5,000 to $50,000 plus free compute, says Nosana's 2025 review. Past winners it names include Inferia, AiMo Network, AnveVoice and Voight.

Is Nosana safe? Audits, upgrade control and risks

Nosana is open source and has run in production since January 2025, but only one of its four Solana programs has a public audit. The staking program was audited twice by Op Codes in August 2022. The programs repository itself warns: "Most code is unaudited. Use at your own risk."

That leaves the Jobs, Rewards and Pools programs without a published audit. The Jobs program is the one that holds customer payments in escrow.

The programs can be changed. Nosana's deployment notes say a Squads multisig vault is the upgrade authority for all mainnet programs, so an upgrade needs several signers to approve it. That is safer than a single key. The notes do not say who the signers are or how many must agree, and we could not read the authority directly from an explorer for this review.

Other risks to weigh:

• Your workload runs on a stranger's hardware. Nosana advertises workload isolation, and Premium markets use more closely validated hosts, but independent machines are a different trust model from a single cloud provider.
• Hosts are paid in NOS, so earnings in dollar terms move with the token.
• Staked NOS is locked for at least 14 days, and the passive reward has an end date.
• Hosts should use a wallet holding very little SOL, on a sandboxed machine, as Nosana's own setup guide advises.

In our research we found no public report of an exploit of the Nosana programs as of October 2026.

Nosana vs Render Network and centralised GPU clouds

Nosana and Render Network RENDER$1.93+1.8% both pool idle GPUs, but they started from different jobs. Render grew out of 3D rendering for graphics work. Nosana is built for running AI models in containers, and it lives on Solana. The two are partners as well as rivals.

In early 2024 Render's community voted on a proposal called RNP-008. It set out to plug Nosana into Render so the two networks could share GPUs for AI work. Voting ran from 31 January to 6 February 2024. The proposal is marked as approved in Render's proposal list. Kraken's asset statement still names Render as one of the projects that compete with Nosana.

Against the big clouds, Nosana sells on price and freedom. You pay as you go, sign no contract, and Nosana claims a saving of up to six times. The cost is the one Nosana states itself. You give up managed services and the support that large companies expect.

Nosana team, history and partners

Nosana was founded by Jesse Eisses and Sjoerd Dijkstra. The team is based in the Netherlands, says Kraken's asset statement. Nosana says the idea came from the founders' time as AI students who could not get hold of GPUs.

The project first set out to run CI/CD, the automatic building and testing of software. It then changed course, in a post titled Nosana's New Direction: AI Inference. Test networks followed. The public GPU marketplace opened on 14 January 2025.

Since then Nosana has added GPUs through two hardware firms, Exabits and PiKNiK, and has named OpenGPU as a partner. Its best-known customer is Sogni AI, an app that makes images. Nosana says Sogni passed 25 million images made on Nosana GPUs in 2025.

Spare GPU time has also gone to Folding@Home, a science project that studies proteins. Nosana says it ranked among the top 20 monthly donors of computing power worldwide.

Nosana's main website has moved from nosana.io to nosana.com. Its docs now live at learn.nosana.com.