Nosana

Nosana is an open-source, decentralized GPU compute marketplace built on Solana. It matches AI developers and enterprises that need scalable compute with GPU owners who want to monetize idle hardware capacity, creating a peer-to-peer market for AI inference, training, fine-tuning, rendering, and simulation workloads.

Core Mechanism

The network operates through three participants: users who deploy containerized AI workloads, GPU providers who host compute resources and earn rewards, and Solana smart contracts that coordinate matching, payments, staking, and job settlement. Solana handles the marketplace layer -- job posting, node registration, stake management, and on-chain reward distribution -- while the physical GPUs execute workloads off-chain. This separation keeps coordination trustless and transparent while allowing real compute throughput.

Workloads are defined as container images and dispatched to matched GPU hosts through a job queue. Providers must stake NOS tokens to participate in the network, creating an economic commitment that aligns incentives toward reliable service. A credit-based payment system handles billing for users, with NOS tokens underpinning the reward layer for providers.

History and Pivot

Nosana was founded in 2021 as a decentralized CI/CD (continuous integration and delivery) platform, originally designed to give developers access to distributed compute for software build pipelines. As generative AI gained mainstream adoption through 2022 and 2023, the team identified AI inference as a far larger and more urgent compute demand. Every user interaction with a deployed AI model requires GPU compute, and centralized cloud pricing had not kept pace with that demand. Nosana pivoted its infrastructure to target AI inference, repurposing its marketplace architecture for the emerging DePIN (decentralized physical infrastructure) sector.

A series of phased test grids through 2023 and 2024 validated the network using workloads like Stable Diffusion image generation and Whisper speech recognition. The mainnet GPU marketplace launched publicly on January 14, 2025, transitioning from protocol demonstration to production infrastructure open to any developer or GPU host.

Key Products and Features

The platform supports over 20 GPU models, ranging from consumer-grade NVIDIA RTX 3060 cards priced at approximately $0.048 per hour to enterprise H100 clusters at approximately $1.50 per hour. Nosana claims cost savings of up to 6x compared to equivalent centralized cloud offerings by aggregating underutilized consumer and prosumer GPUs that would otherwise sit idle.

Developers access the network through a web dashboard, a REST API, a TypeScript SDK, or a command-line interface. Supported AI frameworks include vLLM, LMDeploy, Ollama, and Stable Diffusion. The Nosana Explorer provides on-chain verification of every job step -- posting, pickup, extension, completion -- with timestamped transaction links for full auditability.

The platform supports agentic workloads, high-performance inference, image generation, audio processing, simulation, and model training and fine-tuning alongside standard inference tasks.

NOS Token

The NOS token is a Solana SPL token (program address: nosScmHY2uR24Zh751PmGj9ww9QRNHewh9H59AfrTJE) that serves as the economic backbone of the network. GPU providers stake NOS to join the grid and earn NOS as rewards for completed jobs. Token holders can participate in governance; the NNP-001 tokenomics proposal, passed in 2025, reformed reward distribution to tie emissions directly to actual network usage and service quality rather than fixed yields. As of mid-2026, NOS carried a market cap of approximately $24 million and more than 14,000 active stakers.

Network Growth and Metrics

By February 2026, Nosana had surpassed 50,000 independent GPU hosts since the mainnet launch. In 2024 alone, the network completed 985,000 compute jobs. The Sogni.AI partnership -- which uses Nosana to power AI image generation on iOS and macOS -- passed 25 million images generated on Nosana infrastructure by early 2025. Active users include AI Builders, Alio, Sogni, and OpenGPU.

The network has expanded GPU supply into Japan and across Asia to improve regional latency, through infrastructure partnerships with Exabits and PiKNiK (which contributed NVIDIA A5000 GPUs). Nosana also became one of the top 20 monthly contributors worldwide to Folding@Home, running protein folding simulations on idle network capacity.

Ecosystem and Solana Fit

Nosana sits at the intersection of Solana's DePIN ecosystem and the broader AI infrastructure market. Solana's low transaction fees and high throughput make it well-suited for the high-frequency, small-value coordination transactions required to match GPU jobs, settle rewards, and manage staking at network scale. The project has deep ties to the Solana developer community through partnerships with ShipyardNL and Superteam NL, sponsoring hackathons and onboarding developers to decentralized inference deployments.

A grants program launched in 2025 offers $5,000 to $50,000 to projects building deployment tooling, documentation, and integrations on Nosana infrastructure, supporting broader ecosystem growth.

Audit status has not been publicly documented in the sources reviewed for this profile.