Gonka — Linux for the AI era

In 1991, Linus Torvalds — a 22-year-old Finnish student — released his “hobby” for free and with open source code. Corporations scoffed: Microsoft called Linux a “cancer,” Sun sold Solaris for thousands of dollars, and Linux's market share was near zero. No one believed that a free OS, written by enthusiasts, could compete with billion-dollar corporations.

Key milestones of what happened next:

• 1999: Red Hat goes public — the first company to build a business on open-source software.
• 2008: Google launches Android on the Linux kernel — today, 90% of smartphones globally.
• 2013: Docker revolutionizes servers — containers run on Linux.
• 2025: 75% of servers, 100% of TOP500 supercomputers, all cloud infrastructure from AWS, Google Cloud, Azure — run on Linux.

Gonka replicates this pattern: open-source code on GitHub, anyone can connect their GPU, price is determined by the market, not a corporate price list. The difference is one: Linux took 20 years. In the age of crypto and AI, cycles accelerate — Bitcoin went from $0 to $100K in 15 years, and Gonka has already connected ~4,648 GPUs in the first months after launch.

Today, four corporations control most of the world's AI computations—and each builds its own "walled garden":

• OpenAI: ChatGPT, GPT-5.4, prices $2.50–15 per million tokens. Closed source code, closed training data, complete control over what the model can and cannot answer.
• Google: Gemini, monopoly on TPU—specialized chips that cannot be bought or rented outside of Google Cloud at all.
• Anthropic: Claude. One of the leaders in quality, but API is only available through its own platform with full control over usage.
• Meta: Llama—formally an open model, but inference is still centralized: running Llama 400B+ costs tens of thousands of dollars per month on self-owned hardware.

The problem is not just prices. Four companies de facto determine the future of AI for all humanity. Each of them decides what the model can say (censorship), who gets access (geo-blocking), and how much it costs (monopolistic pricing). A single decision by the board of directors—and millions of users lose access to an intellectual resource. This repeats the situation of 2001: a few corporations control critical infrastructure, and alternatives seem unserious. Until someone proves otherwise.

All Gonka code is open-source on GitHub. Any GPU owner can join the network—no corporate permission needed, no license, no subscription. The price of an AI request is determined by supply and demand in the open market, not by a board of directors' decision. In the first months, about 4,648 GPUs from ~113 participants connected to the network—and this number is growing.

A key mechanism that Linux and Gonka share is evolution through competition. Bitcoin, in 15 years, evolved from mining on ordinary processors (CPU, 2009) to specialized ASIC chips (2013), increasing mining energy efficiency by 300,000 times. This is not a coincidence—it's a market mechanism: when thousands of independent participants compete for a reward, each looks for ways to make computations cheaper and faster.

The same mechanism works in Gonka. Hosts compete for AI tasks, optimizing their GPUs, software, and network infrastructure. Every improvement in the efficiency of one host results in a reduction in inference prices for all users. The cost of AI requests through Gonka is already $0.0009 per million tokens—~2,800 times cheaper than GPT from OpenAI. And this is despite the network being in its early stages: with the growth in the number of GPUs and inferenced optimization, prices will continue to decrease.

Linux spawned a trillion-dollar ecosystem. Red Hat — acquired by IBM for $34 billion. Canonical (Ubuntu) — became the standard for servers and IoT. Android — a trillion-dollar ecosystem running on the Linux kernel. Thousands of companies built businesses on open source software, without even touching the kernel's source code — they built on top: tools, services, integrations.

Gonka can become the foundation of a similar ecosystem for AI. Already, layers of businesses are forming around the network:

• Gateways: proxy services that sell AI requests for fiat — joingonka.ai, GonkaGate, proxy.gonka.gg.
• Pools: operators who combine GPUs and sell shares — Gonka.Top, GonkaPool.ai, Hashiro, Mingles.
• Integrators: companies integrating Gonka inference into their products via an OpenAI-compatible API.
• Infrastructure: GPU providers (Spheron), node monitoring, analytics tools.

GNK — the “fuel” of this ecosystem, analogous to electricity for data centers: every AI request requires GNK, every participant in the ecosystem creates demand for the token. The project has raised $80M from Coatue, Bitfury, Insight Partners — institutional capital believes in this story. For an investor, GNK is not a bet on one company, but on an entire open AI ecosystem, similar to investing in Linux in 2001.