Akash Network surges 12%, leading AI tokens bounce

Akash Network (AKT) price was up 12% on Thursday as the cryptocurrency ranked second behind Book of Meme (BOME) as the top gainers.

While BOME leads top 100 gainers by market cap with a 24-hour gain of over 14%, AKT traded to highs of $3.45. The AI related token led other coins in this category, with only Render (RNDR) and The Graph (GRT) in the green among top AI and Big Data cryptocurrencies.

SingularityNET, Fetch.ai and Ocean Protocol, which are headed for a merger under the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI), were all dumping more than 10% at the time of writing.

The all-time high for AKT was $8.07 reached in April 2021.

However, while in the current market cycle, the cryptocurrency peaked at $6.22 on March 10, 2024. A surge amid Upbit listing in April saw AKT break to above $6.03 before paring gains.

Akash Network price up amid RenAIssance Hackathon

The broader crypto market was up just 1% to about $2.29 trillion, but Akash Network appeared to defy this with its double-digit gain.

As well as the announcement that Crypto.com now supports AKT staking with up to 19% in rewards, positive vibes around Akash Network may have come from another major network related event.

On June 25, the Akash team revealed a collaboration with Flock, a platform for decentralized training of AI models.

With FLock.io, AKT holders can participate in an open and collaborative ecosystem, contributing to training of models, for on-chain rewards. Users can also contribute data and other computing resources to earn AKT.

The RenAIssance Hackathon offers rewards in AKT, USDC and native FLock token FML.  Top 3 models in the hackathon will earn 400 USDC and $400 worth of AKT for the winner; 300 USDC plus $300 worth of AKT will go to the runner up and 200 USDC plus $200 in AKT for the third-place model.

Participants also stand to win 200 USDC and $200 worth of AKT for winning validators.