Render is a cryptocurrency token on Solana that, to me, looks like the price is going to trend toward zero. I think it's drastically overvalued and hyped up, based on the research I'm going to walk through here. I considered buying this a bunch of times and looked at it closely, and these are my conclusions. This is my opinion and my own experience, not investment advice.
If you look at the price chart, Render is around $9 right now. And what happened? Well, it had its first bull market release and it pumped, and then it was doing basically nothing until Render migrated to Solana. My theory, which I have no proof of but which seems logical to me, is that they accepted money from Solana to move over to the network, because then the token would pump and Solana would get that action. I can't prove that, but it feels logical to me. And then after the move to Solana, Render had this huge pump, and all the Solana shillers started shilling Render too, because it's now a Solana token. When I watched them shill Render, I thought, okay, let's see what is actually here.
A $5 billion market cap, the same as Internet Computer
First, it's a roughly $5 billion fully diluted market cap, which puts it at nearly the same market cap as Internet Computer. And Internet Computer, to me, is the absolute best technology in crypto. It's the first true third generation blockchain. It runs AI fully on chain — small models at this point, but nothing else can even come close to doing that. It's got a Bitcoin and Ethereum layer two, both on the same infrastructure. I've done videos going on and on about Internet Computer, but it also has the largest research and development team in blockchain.
So what does Render do that values it similar in market cap to Internet Computer? First off, it's a token. And there's one thing I despise about how tokens are being used. The way they're used in crypto, they are essentially being used like a stock, where you're thinking you have some kind of ownership over the protocol because you're holding the token. But Render being a Solana token, what does this actually give you? No actual ownership over the Render network or protocol. Why? Because there is no hard-coded real ownership.
This is my same critique with every single token — except the ones on Internet Computer Protocol. Internet Computer Protocol is so advanced that if you buy a token on it, for example OpenChat, that token is actually set up on a DAO that runs fully on chain. When you are holding chat and voting, that actually controls the OpenChat application. People could vote to shut the OpenChat application down. They could vote to do almost anything, and change the code, because it's all fully on chain. Only Internet Computer can do that. This means, in my view, every token that's not on Internet Computer is a pseudo stock with no legal or real ownership.
"GPU rendering on the blockchain" is misleading
So in theory, the Render network could actually succeed at what it's doing of distributed GPU rendering. But this is misleading, and this is why I chose not to invest in it and why I'm saying I think it's going to zero. It says distributed GPU rendering on the blockchain — but which blockchain exactly is it rendering on?
It's misleading because of how you probably think it works. You probably picture that you're buying the Render token, and the basic idea — why people are getting hyped up, what the shillers are saying — is that Render is going to get used for rendering AI, crypto-based AI technologies, the metaverse, all of that. All this stuff is going to be using Render. And then in your mind you probably think all of that is actually happening on chain, because it's a token and it's on Solana. You're picturing in your head that, let's say I have an AI model I want to run, you imagine I go to Render and it runs on Solana somehow. But that's not how it technically works.
What really happens is that all the actual machines are off chain, which means your on-chain Solana token has absolutely no real ownership over any of the machines on the network. And that means this is not accurate. It is not distributed GPU rendering on the blockchain, because the rendering is not happening on the blockchain. It is happening on a machine that is not on the blockchain. There is a little token on the blockchain, but the Render Network website is not on the blockchain either, which means this is completely centralized. The people at Render Network have full control over everything at all times. To me, it is disingenuous decentralization, which is why I don't invest in it. You think it's one thing, but it's not.
It says Render Token is a distributed GPU rendering network, now built on top of the Solana blockchain, aiming to connect artists and studios in need of GPU compute power with mining powers willing to rent their GPU capabilities out. "Aiming" means we're not even really doing anything yet — this is just theoretical. And connecting those people is not on chain. None of that is on chain. It's just a marketplace, and the token has no ownership over anything.
It's a payment token, and that's it
When you look at how Render works, it's a utility token used by artists on the network to exchange GPU power from GPU providers. That's the only thing the token does. It's a payment token. And what's to stop people from accepting payments in a stablecoin instead of Render? It says Render uses a combination of a manual and automatic proof of work system in order to verify art has been successfully rendered, and that Render tokens are kept in escrow for payment. So this is just a payment token, which to me is extremely limited potential utility.
And there's another critical problem. Since this is not actually on the blockchain, it's just a marketplace of people who have GPUs to rent and people who want GPU power. So let's think for a moment. Let's imagine I want to run an AI model — say I want to make a Jerry Banfield bot that's better than ChatGPT — and I'm going to need a lot of graphics cards to run that model. Would I go to Render to run that? Or would I just go to the people who already have all that rendering power, like Google or Microsoft? They already have massive infrastructure to run these things. These centralized entities already have things like ChatGPT that you can just plug into. They already have all the computation figured out. There's no reason to go use something like Render, because it's not actually on the blockchain, which means it can't do real secure computing, which is necessary for AI. If I wanted the best experience with AI, I'd want to run it actually on chain, in smart contracts. And the only place you have any hope of doing that is on Internet Computer Protocol.
So Render is a token that's almost exclusively used for payments, and you can't even see the artist portal without signing up. I signed up a while back, and I was not impressed. It seemed like there weren't even that many different machines to run on, and there was very little utility. That means Render Network is extremely speculative. And I'd say 99% of the time, this is drastically overvalued, in the sense that it's a token representing value that's not actually on chain. The only utility it can hope to have is payments. To me, this is basically a meme coin, where you're just hoping the price will go up because other people get tricked into buying it. That's why I didn't buy it — I'm tired of getting tricked into buying things that have no value. This is the same reason I keep coming back to why I think almost every crypto except ICP is effectively a meme coin.
The holder count is one of the worst metrics I can show you
Let's check a couple of other angles before we wrap this review up. First, if you look at the Render token on Solscan, it has about 25,000 holders. That's horrible. There are meme coins that launch and have 25,000 holders practically instantly. Solana prides itself on meme coins — that seems to be the whole business plan. And this only has 25,000 holders.
By comparison, on Internet Computer there are more than double the number of people. If you look at the number of addresses that hold over 100 ICP, there are around 42,000 addresses on Internet Computer that hold over $1,000 worth of ICP — and this is about the same market cap. That's a great indication. And if you go for smaller addresses, there are millions of wallets that have been created on Internet Computer Protocol. If you want to go to at least one ICP, there are about 142,000 addresses that hold at least one ICP. So if you compare the raw number of holders, and you consider how popular Solana is and how few holders Render has in comparison, that's horrible. That is one of the worst metrics I could show you.
From the perhaps more important big picture: if you take the total market cap, about $5 billion with its nine zeros, and divide by 25,000, the average holder is being valued at around $200,000. That is horrible. That is so drastically overvalued, it's shocking. And why is it overvalued? Because the people shilling Solana have been shilling this, and yet I don't see any real value. People get paid to shill things like this and constantly try to get views, saying stuff like this is going to go up. No one wants to be the person in here destroying it. I'm the reluctant hero — y'all want somebody to be honest about these things, so here you go.
One single address also holds about 12% of the entire balance of the total market cap. And if you look at the top 100 addresses, they hold more than half the tokens. So the distribution is not decentralized at all. But who even cares if the tokens are decentralized, when the entire protocol is misleading? The entire protocol is not decentralized. The Render people have full control over everything.
I like the vision, but I think it's misrepresented
Their vision is admirable. I like the idea that you could just rent out your GPU — I could rent out the GPUs on my computer. But I looked into that too, and if you have a regular GPU, you're not going to make enough money to make it worth it. I like what they're trying to do. What I don't like is that what they're trying to do is being misrepresented and, to me, drastically overvalued. This is not on-chain computation.
One final thing, and I'll wrap this up. If you look at the team and the advisors, you've got Jules as the founder, and then several advisors. They've got a nice advisor in Brendan Eich from Brave, and a decent set of advisors overall — but what are they actually doing on the protocol itself? Look at the core team. There's a head of blockchain, a technology officer, a project manager, and a few blockchain developers. The core team of people working on the actual protocol and token is less than 10. Less than 10. Now, you might not think anything of that, but for a $5 billion market cap, maybe half of them are actually doing real development work.
Now compare that with Internet Computer, which has the largest research and development team in blockchain — some of the absolute best people. You've got researchers like Jan Camenisch, with around 120 widely cited papers, a principal research staff member at IBM, leading scientists in blockchain and cryptography, and Dominic Williams, the founder. There are hundreds of technical staff and engineers there. The employees at DFINITY have 250-plus patents, thousands of publications, hundreds of thousands of citations. And keep in mind, this is about the same market cap as Render. Render has a handful of technical people who appear to actually be on the core team working on it.
My honest valuation
So to me, if I were to value this, an accurate valuation would be about 99% lower. I might even consider that to be a generous valuation. Maybe it would be something I'd want to look at if it had a $50 million market cap. I believe this is as much as 100 times overvalued right now, based on what it can actually do and the properties of the token. Again, it's a pseudo stock. It gives you no real ownership over anything. Even if you want to be optimistic, I don't see how it's actually governed. If you hold the Render token, do you even get any voting power? Do you get any say in how the Render network develops? Not that I can see. And even if you did, why would I accumulate Render tokens besides speculating on the price? Based on what I've gone through, this to me is more likely to go to zero than to be a good investment. If you want to see my reasoning on more coins like this, I keep these reviews going in my Money playlist, and I've made the same case about another big Solana token in my Jupiter (JUP) review.
I'll show you how accurate I am over time. I've got a spreadsheet I'm building where, for every single crypto I review and think ICP is a better investment than, I put the price of that crypto that day and the ICP price, and compare them. In the first few days, you'd actually be up a couple percent if you literally went directly against me. But let's see how things go over time. Sometimes, especially in crypto, anything can get hyped up and trend temporarily. But long term, I believe the best technology with the most utility will tend to dominate and win out over everything else. That same logic runs through my honest review of Aave as well.
I filmed this live, based on requests from viewers like you who said, please review Render. If you ever want to go deeper or ask me about a specific coin directly, I keep the conversation going every week inside the Jerry Banfield Family. And one more thing worth noting: jerrybanfield.com is hosted on Internet Computer, fully on chain — something Render absolutely cannot do. Internet Computer's web hosting alone, just as a web host, is so far superior to anything else in the market that to me it deserves its valuation on that basis alone, and that's a tiny fraction of what it can actually do.
I hope you are successful in your crypto investing, and I'm going to go review another crypto now.