To everyone sailing with us

Over the past year, the Gradient community’s incredible energy around the Sentry Node Open Beta has brought the network to life. What began as an exploratory initiative has grown into a living foundation powered by thousands of people worldwide.

This foundation is not the destination. It is the launchpad. Now we are ready to take it further.

In that spirit, we want to share openly and personally why we are building this, what we have achieved together, and how the next chapter turns our groundwork into momentum for something much greater.

Why Gradient exists

Gradient was born from a simple yet radical question:

Can the world build a layer of collective intelligence not inside a closed data center, but through the hands and machines of millions of people? Can we build an open, distributed counterpart to today’s AI giants?

Generative AI has become the fastest-growing industry of our time. Yet, most people are only consumers of AI services. Our community should also be creators and owners, equipped with the tools to run these systems, shape them, and decide their future.

We started this journey in September 2024. Within a year, Gradient has grown from an idea into a global foundation with real software, real research, and a real community that spans continents.

Inside Gradient, we are committed to the long game. We are not chasing quick wins. We are building for a future where our name stands alongside other tech giants with an architecture that is open, community-powered, and verifiable by design. That means investing in research, product engineering, and pushing the boundaries of what community-driven AI can do.

This path demands endurance, clarity, and resilience, and the prize is worth it. Not just for us as a team, but for all of us as a network and a community.

Why we started the Sentry Node Open Beta

The foundation of our vision is peer connectivity. It lays the groundwork for all distributed AI workloads. Sentry Nodes were our first step toward a massive peer-to-peer network for data transmission and network topology. From day one, they gave us two rare advantages:

A real-time view of global network conditions, which is critical for building a mesh that supports distributed training, inference, and multi-agent workflows.
A diverse worldwide community contributing from desktops, laptops, and all other consumer devices across every continent, united by the same vision.

We designed Sentry Nodes to be feather-light. It uses only a few kilobytes of bandwidth per day with minimal CPU load. We never used excessive bandwidth, and we never collected any personal data for profit. At the very core, we believe participation should be easy, inclusive, and sustainable for all. Sentry Node is our invitation—an open door for you to travel this journey alongside us.

With millions of participants and billions of Taps, we have established a strong peer-to-peer connectivity foundation. Together, these Sentry Nodes form Lattica, our distributed data communication protocol.

Season 1 will conclude on 28 August 2025, 12:00 UTC, marking the graduation of the Sentry Node Open Beta. Sentry Nodes will no longer accumulate new Uptime or Taps after that.

For our community, this is not the end of participation—it is the beginning of the main act. The team is cooking up something big: a tailor-made product that brings together everything we’ve been building into one seamless, tangible experience, giving every community member direct access to the full power of distributed intelligence.

And we would love for you, who are reading this right now, to be among the first to join the new program and witness a true shift in how AI is built and shared. Stay tuned!

What we’ve built together

Step by step, experiment by experiment, the stack has grown stronger. We are already seeing distributed AI frameworks running on consumer machines, supported by a global community.

Echo — Our distributed reinforcement learning framework. It coordinates scalable self-play across a distributed machine network while decoupling inference from learning so each task runs on the best-suited hardware. Agents improve across thousands of machines, not just inside a single data center.

Parallax — The world’s first fully decentralized inference engine. It enables large language models to be hosted on consumer devices that could never fit them before. You can run a sovereign model endpoint or share your compute with others, forming a global mesh for inference at the scale of DeepSeek R1 and ChatGPT-OSS-120B.

Lattica — The universal data communication protocol. Any peer can serve data to others efficiently across the open web. Today, it already runs on millions of peers worldwide. Over time, Lattica will power all peer-to-peer connections within the Gradient architecture.

These are among the hardest problems in AI and distributed systems—areas few teams are willing or able to take on. And this is where we choose to stand: solving the hard parts piece by piece and proving they work at scale.

Just as importantly, we make these technologies tangible. We ship playgrounds you can try, so you can experience the magic, see the design craft, and be proud to say: I am part of this.

Alongside our research frameworks, we have also soft-launched Gradient Cloud, a production-ready platform that brings our distributed AI research to everyone. Today, Gradient Cloud provides inference endpoints for leading models, including Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct-FP8, GPT-OSS-120B, and more. Over time, we will integrate our research breakthroughs into the platform.

Gradient Cloud reflects our belief that distributed innovations should serve everyone, and benefit the community that makes them possible. Try it and tell us what you think.

What’s next

We are not slowing down. In the next quarter, we will focus on more research and products to deepen our capabilities and expand the community’s role.

Multi-agent collaboration that lets people worldwide, each with their own agents, work together and scale intelligence output in a collective way.
Self-evolving agentic systems running fully on a distributed, community-owned mesh, pushing beyond what centralized stacks can achieve.
Collective intelligence in new verticals from robotics to science and beyond. The only boundary is our imagination.
A blockchain coordination layer that rewards contributions fairly with on-chain verification and proofs, so that everyone can win together.

Together, these systems form the Gradient Stack—an operating system and runtime for distributed AI.

On the question of “Wen?”

We know the TGE question is on everyone’s mind. That is why we will not launch recklessly. A strong launch is about readiness across research, products, collaborations, and community alignment.

Less than a year after launching the Sentry Node Open Beta, we published research across multiple fronts, delivered products with a seamless user experience, and built one of the most engaged communities in the space. That momentum is our advantage, and we will protect it.

From the beginning, our goal has been clear: to build the strongest foundation for community-trained and community-hosted AI.We are getting closer every day, and the depth of this community gives us confidence in the path we are on.

2025 will be a big year for all of us. Until then, we will continue building, delivering, and earning your trust through technology that lasts and tokenomics designed to sustain.

Our commitment

Today, we have a massive community standing behind Gradient. That reach is something no closed lab can overlook. It shows that open and distributed AI is not only possible. It is inevitable.

Our commitment stands. Every honest contribution matters, and we will keep finding fair ways to honor it. And, this is bigger than rewards. You are helping make history by steering the future of intelligence for all humankind.

The future lies in what we build together. Gradient is not just a project. It is a collective movement, and it will continue to grow with every one of you.

Let’s build it.

The Gradient Team