Bittensor Brief #18: NODEXO - Subnet 27

Hello everybody. Welcome to yet another Bittensor Brief. Today we're covering Nodeexo subnet 27. I think it's Nodeexo or maybe it's Node XO. I'm not sure. But anyway, Nodeexo subnet 27 on Bittensor.

Node XO provides compute that you can cryptographically trust. The basic idea here is, when you rent a GPU from a provider, how do you know that it's really the GPU that they say that it is? How do you know you're not getting some cheaper GPU or some cheaper computer or even a virtualized computer that's not exactly what they sold you?

They pull a little switcheroo behind the scenes. Can't happen theoretically in Nodeexo. That's the problem that they're solving.

Anyone can claim they have GPUs. Anyone can claim that they ran a workload, but very few systems can prove cryptographically and continuously that a specific physical GPU was alive correctly executing real work at a specific time. That is the trust layer that Nodeexo has built.

Now, a long time ago, when I was a young lad, I worked at a company that was backed by Sequoia, and Michael Moritz, who is one of Earth's best investors over a 40-year period. Sequoia had invested in this company I worked for, and Moritz came to speak with us, and we got to ask him questions.

One of the questions that was asked was, "So, you have this long history of investing. Is there a pattern between the companies that succeed and the companies that fail? Sort of like a general rule of thumb."

I had thought the answer was going to be no. It's different in every case. But Moritz actually lit right up, yeah, actually there is one pattern that is true all the time. If a company focuses on one thing only and is the best in the world at this one narrow sliver of thing, they have a shot at winning.

It doesn't mean they will definitely win, but it means that it's possible and it means that it's a lot more likely. However, if a company focuses on lots of things and gets distracted and thinks that they're doing two or more business plans at the same time, 100% of the time it will definitely fail. That is the recipe for certain death.

The other recipe focusing narrowly is not a recipe for certain life but it is a recipe for maybe succeeding and it is the only recipe for maybe succeeding. That is what Node Dexo has done. So they're focusing on delivering only one service in accordance with what Mike Moritz told us this one time very long ago.

So what does Nodeexo do? Their one thing, their one party trick. They don't host models, they don't provide prompt AIs, they don't dictate frameworks, agents or stacks. The only thing they do is connect bare metal GPUs and GPU VMs from home rigs, colloccated racks, enterprise clusters and cloud providers into a single marketplace and focuses on doing one thing exceptionally well.

Prove the compute actually happened on real hardware, not on virtualized machines and not on paper.

So how did they do this? By what sorcery do they make this occur? The core of Nodeexo is something they call proof of GPU. So proof of GPU introduces rolling non-interactive validation that continuously verifies GPU capability using deterministic workloads.

I'm not exactly sure how this works, but basically they install software on the machines on the GPU that makes the GPU prove that it is what it says that it is. And the validation this software that runs on the machine the validation happens in near real time typically within minutes.

You don't have to wait to get your validation your certification that the GPU that you think you rented actually was a GPU rented. It's more or less in real time.

I should also note that I've not personally verified that this works as advertised. So, I don't know. I can't say I can't tell you for certain that this piece of software and what Nodeexo is doing actually verifies that this GPU ran. These are the claims of the company. So, do your own research.

But if they do provide what they say they're providing, it's pretty cool and I do like what they're doing.

Node Dexo reduces friction for the GPU providers by making everything really easy. The GPU providers never fool around with crypto. They never touch a blockchain. All they do is install the Node Dexo agent. So this is the software that they make their GPU providers install.

They register their hardware offchain. So it's has nothing to do with Bittensor and then they start accepting jobs. That's it. So everything happens in the background.

From the provers perspective, they just connect their hardware, they run jobs, they get paid. They don't fool around with crypto at all.

Now in the background what happens is the validation software that is proving that the GPU is real and running what it says it is these this software reports into the validators so the Bittensor validators in the chain.

There are no miners on subnet 27 doesn't exist. What they've done is they've rethought how validation works. So the only thing that's happening is that validators on subnet 27 are interfacing with the software that exists on the GPUs in this GPU array that subnet 27 has set up and the validators check the output of the software and validate that in fact the GPU that's claimed to be running is in fact running.

Subnet 27 validators are no longer acting as a reward faucet. They're not deciding who gets Bittensor rewards. Instead, all they're doing is acting as a neutral trust oracle. And for this service, they get paid as validators.

It's a little bit weird in terms of the way Bittensor subnets usually work. It doesn't work the way most subnets work. So, it's fair to say that Node Dexo fundamentally changes the role of validators.

This gets rid of yield farming dynamics, right? Because there's no minor, right? It's not like the GPU providers are getting paid subnet tokens. They're not. So the GPU providers are getting paid directly by the users, right? It's just a real business.

The validator the validators label which providers are trustworthy over time. So the only thing that Bittensor is providing is more or less certification that GPU providers are providing authentic GPU.

This forces the network towards real pricing of GPUs, real reliability and real competition.

Once the validators have audited certain GPU they actually turn around and they emlazen their findings their public proof of auditability they put that on the Ethereum blockchain. So if you want to go and inspect so Ethereum the Ethereum blockchain effectively becomes a running log file for subnet 27 on Bittensor containing a bunch of proofs of GPU.

If you want to go and check whether you were provided with authentic GPU well the sort of certification of proof is emlazed on the Ethereum blockchain as data. So you can just go and look see you know did I get ooked? Well, let me go look and see if the certification exists on Ethereum. It either does or it doesn't.

If it does, you can go and look at it and pull it yourself. And this means that it can't be forged.

Subnet 27 is the one printing these proofs on the Ethereum blockchain. So, again, this is sort of weird. It's sort of very different from things that we normally see in Bittensor.

I think this is a pretty interesting new experiment, and I applaud it. I like I like what I'm seeing here.

So, you're probably asking yourself if you're a Bittensor subnet especially, how do I purchase these wonderful toys? How do I get my own GPUs that are certified as authentic?

Nodeexo plugs directly into the Bittensor economy. Users, that is you person out there with Bittensor, a Bittensor wallet can pay for GPU using any alpha token. So they will accept any of the 128 alpha tokens or they'll accept USDC.

So you can pay using Bittensor subnet tokens if you want. Node XOO converts payments into internal compute credits while maintaining a public proof trail linking value exchanged to the verified GPU work delivered.

Alpha tokens are not purely speculative. They are now currency and they can buy you GPU. So they become real purchasing power for verified infrastructure.

If you want to know more about Node XOO, we've included the link down below. You can click that link in the video description and click through to find out more about Node XOO.

Link: [URL]

My name is Mark Jeffrey. This has been another Bittensor Brief. Hope you enjoyed it.