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, and its main use is AI inference: running a trained model to answer requests. It is a DePIN network, meaning real hardware run by many owners and tied together by a blockchain. Solana keeps the record of jobs, payments and staking, while the AI work runs on the hosts' own machines. The marketplace opened on 14 January 2025, and Nosana says it can cost up to six times less than a big cloud.

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, per the getting started guide. A wallet is optional, so you never have to touch crypto to use it.

These were some of the hourly prices on nosana.com in November 2026:

Nosana lists 23 NVIDIA cards, from home gaming GPUs to data-centre ones. Each GPU market sets its own job price, so check the dashboard for the current rate before you deploy.

You can pay with a card, with USDC or with NOS. Card and USDC top-ups are turned into NOS behind the scenes, says a Nosana post from 2 October 2026, The Token Behind the Compute. So you pay in dollars, and hosts still get 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's website lists training, fine-tuning, inference, rendering and simulation among the jobs it can run.

Nosana MCP, Claude Code skill, API keys and SSH access

Nosana gives developers several ways to run GPU jobs from their own tools. An MCP server and an agent skill let AI coding assistants deploy and manage workloads for you. API keys with set permissions cover scripts, and SSH lets you log in to a running job.

MCP is a standard way for AI tools to talk to outside services. Nosana MCP 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. The MCP guide says the server is built from the same blueprint as Nosana's main API. With it, your assistant can manage your deployments and check GPU markets. It can also scale a service up, review a deployment's events and track your credits.

The Nosana agent skill for Claude Code followed on 26 October 2026. It teaches a coding agent to take a workload "from job definition to live endpoint", Nosana says. The skill lives in the Nosana Kit repository and installs as a Claude Code plugin, with /plugin marketplace add nosana-ci/nosana-kit and then /plugin install nosana@nosana.

API keys gained permissions in October 2026, per Nosana's October update. You choose what each key may do. A key can read your jobs and credits, for example, without being able to spend anything. That matters if you hand a key to a script or an agent.

SSH access arrived 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.

A support bot called Nosa went into beta on the Nosana Discord on 6 October 2026. It answers from the docs, the SDK and CLI references, and past support cases, and links its sources.

Hosting a GPU on Nosana: earn NOS from your graphics card

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. Nosana no longer supports Windows through WSL2, so 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 get a bonus equal to 20% daily use. In plain terms, Nosana pays 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 to buy NOS

NOS is the Solana token that pays for compute on Nosana. What customers pay ends up in NOS, and hosts earn NOS. Holders can also stake it and vote on changes to the network. 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 split, as listed in Kraken's asset statement from May 2024.

Nosana's token page lists where NOS trades. On Solana you can swap it on Raydium RAY$1.76+12.6% and Jupiter JUP$0.260+4.6%. The listed exchanges are Kraken, Crypto.com, Bitvavo, Gate.io, MEXC and BingX.

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

Nosana staking: xNOS, lock periods and the NNP-0001 rewards change

Nosana staking locks your NOS for between two weeks 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.

The staking docs say xNOS sets your rank for things like giveaways and voting. Your staked NOS stays in the vault; xNOS is a score, not a second token.

The change to rewards 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-controlled tokens excluded, according to Nosana's voting guide. The vote page lists the vote as concluded but does not show the 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.

Under that schedule, passive staking payments end around 29 November 2026 unless a new vote extends them. On 3 November 2026 the vote page listed NNP-0001 as its only proposal, so anyone staking for yield should watch it for a renewal. We could not confirm from Nosana's host documentation how much of the collateral and rebate design is live yet.

Who should use Nosana: developers, AI teams and GPU owners

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 the big clouds are usually stronger for companies that need a full enterprise setup. Those firms often have cloud credits, buying processes and compliance rules already tied to AWS, Google Cloud or Azure. The same guide says training large models from scratch may need more specialised infrastructure.

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 Nosana grant of $5,000 to $50,000, paid in USDC, NOS and GPU credits. Grants are paid against milestones and take no equity, Nosana says. Past winners named in its 2025 review include Inferia, AiMo Network, AnveVoice and Voight.

Is Nosana safe? Audits, upgrade control and risks

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

So the Jobs, Rewards, Pools and Nodes programs have no published audit. The Jobs program is the one that holds what customers pay until a job is done.

The code can be changed. Nosana's deployment notes say a Squads multisig controls upgrades to every program on mainnet. That means no single build tool can push a change alone. The notes do not say who signs or how many must agree. We could not check this on an explorer for this review.

Staked NOS can also be slashed, which means taken away. Nosana's staking docs say the tokens in the vault "can be slashed or unstaked". An authority set in the program decides this.

Other risks to weigh:

• Your workload runs on a stranger's hardware. Nosana says it keeps workloads apart, and Premium markets use hosts it has checked more closely. Even so, many small owners are a different kind of trust from one big cloud firm.
• Hosts are paid in NOS, so earnings in dollar terms move with the token.
• Staked NOS is locked for at least two weeks, 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.
• If you give an API key to a script or an AI agent, give it only the permissions it needs.

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

Nosana vs io.net, Render Network and centralised GPU clouds

Nosana, io.net and Render Network RENDER$1.60+5.4% all rent out GPUs that would otherwise sit idle, and all three run their tokens on Solana. Nosana is built for running AI models in containers, one job per GPU. io.net leans toward big clusters for training. Render grew out of 3D rendering.

io.net began at a Solana hackathon in February 2023, its docs say. It pools GPUs from data centres, crypto miners and other networks, and spreads one job across many machines. It lists training, tuning and reinforcement learning as uses, as well as inference. If your job needs many linked GPUs, io.net is built for that. Nosana is the simpler fit if you want one card running one model at a low hourly price.

Render and Nosana work together as well as compete. RNP-008 is a Render proposal from January 2024, marked approved. It pays a working group to link the two networks, so Nosana jobs can run on Render's GPUs. Kraken's asset statement still names Render as a rival to Nosana.

Against the big clouds, Nosana sells on price and freedom. You pay as you go, sign no contract, and Nosana claims you can save up to six times. Its own guide states the trade-off: you give up the full business setup that large firms often need.

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 has said the idea came from the founders' time as AI students who struggled to 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. It also names OpenGPU as a partner. One named customer is Sogni AI, an app that makes images. Nosana says Sogni made more than 25 million images on Nosana GPUs in 2025.

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

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