Gonka — Linux for the AI era

In 1991, Linus Torvalds — a 22-year-old Finnish student — released his "hobby" for free and as open source. Corporations laughed: Microsoft called Linux a "cancer," Sun sold Solaris for thousands of dollars, and Linux's market share was near zero. No one believed a free OS written by enthusiasts could compete with multi-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 the world's smartphones
• 2013: Docker revolutionizes servers — containers run on Linux
• 2025: 75% of servers, 100% of supercomputers from the TOP500, all cloud infrastructure of AWS, Google Cloud, Azure — run on Linux

Gonka is repeating 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 thing: Linux took 20 years. In the age of crypto and AI, cycles are accelerating — Bitcoin went from $0 to $100K in 15 years, and Gonka launched its mainnet in 2025, where mining is real AI inference.

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

• OpenAI: ChatGPT, GPT-5.5, prices $5–30 per million tokens. Closed code, closed training data, complete control over what the model can and cannot answer.
• Google: Gemini, a monopoly on TPU — specialized chips that cannot be bought or rented outside of Google Cloud.
• Anthropic: Claude. One of the leaders in quality, but the API is only available through their own platform with full control over usage.
• Meta: Llama — a formally open model, but inference is still centralized: running Llama 400B+ costs tens of thousands of dollars a month on your own 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 to give access to (geo-blocking), and how much it costs (monopoly pricing). One board decision — 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 on GitHub. Any GPU owner can join the network — no corporate permission needed, no license required, no subscription needed. The price of an AI request is determined by supply and demand in an open market, not by a board of directors. Currently, the network is running 584 GPUs from independent hosts — and any owner of compatible hardware can connect.

A key mechanism that Linux and Gonka share is evolution through competition. Over 15 years, Bitcoin went from mining on standard processors (CPU, 2009) to specialized ASIC chips (2013), increasing the energy efficiency of mining by 300,000 times. This is not a coincidence — it is a market mechanism: when thousands of independent participants compete for a reward, everyone looks for a way to make computation cheaper and faster.

The same mechanism works in Gonka. Hosts compete for AI tasks, optimizing their GPUs, software, and network infrastructure. Each efficiency improvement by one host results in lower inference prices for all users. The cost of AI requests via Gonka is already $0.0069 per million tokens — about ~720 times cheaper than OpenAI's GPT-5.5. And this is while the network is at an early stage: with an increasing number of GPUs and optimizations in inferenced, prices will continue to drop.

Linux birthed a multi-trillion dollar ecosystem. Red Hat — acquired by IBM for $34B. Canonical (Ubuntu) — became the standard for servers and IoT. Android — an ecosystem worth over $1T, powered by the Linux kernel. Thousands of companies built businesses on open software without even touching the kernel source code — they built on top: tools, services, integrations.

Gonka can become the foundation of a similar ecosystem for AI. Business layers are already forming around the network:

• Gateways: proxy services that sell AI requests for fiat, e.g., joingonka.ai
• Pools: operators that bundle GPUs and sell shares — Gonka.Top, GonkaPool.ai, Ancapex, CloudMine
• Integrators: companies embedding Gonka inference into their products via an OpenAI-compatible API
• Infrastructure: GPU providers (Spheron), node monitoring, analytics tools

GNK is the "fuel" of this ecosystem, analogous to electricity for data centers: every AI request requires GNK; every ecosystem participant 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 a bet not on a single company, but on an entire open AI ecosystem, similar to investing in Linux in 2001.