Introduction

Kiln is a decentralized marketplace for GPU compute on Solana. People with idle GPUs list them at a simple dollar price per hour; people who need compute rent them and pay in USDC or $KILN. The difference from a normal cloud is that you only pay for time the network can prove.

Kiln is early software running on Solana devnet. Nothing has been audited yet. Don't put in money you can't afford to lose.

The problem

Cloud GPUs are expensive and often sold out, while huge numbers of capable consumer and workstation cards sit idle. Marketplaces that connect the two exist, but renters have to trust that the machine they paid for actually ran, and providers have to trust that they'll be paid.

How Kiln answers it

Three pieces work together:

Piece What it does
Escrow on Solana When you rent, your payment goes into an account owned by the Kiln program, not by Kiln or the provider.
Proof of rental While your workload runs, the provider's machine signs a heartbeat transaction every minute. Only time covered by heartbeats is ever paid.
The provider node kiln-provider runs on the GPU machine. It checks you own the lease, starts your container with the GPU attached, sends heartbeats and collects payment.

If a machine goes offline, heartbeats stop and the provider stops earning. When you close your lease, everything that wasn't proven is refunded in the same transaction.

Who it's for

  • Renters: ML engineers, researchers, hobbyists and builders who want a GPU for hours, not a contract. Jupyter, SSH and LLM serving work in one click, or bring any Docker image.
  • Providers: anyone with an NVIDIA GPU, Docker and an internet connection. Gaming rigs, workstations and small racks all qualify.
  • $KILN holders: any GPU on Kiln can be paid for in $KILN, converted to USDC in the same transaction as the rental.

Where to go next

NextThe technology →