First published 20 November 2023, the month the Solana token became the one the foundation told holders to use. Expanded in October 2026 so a GPU marketplace is not described as a second Solana, and so RNDR is not described as already gone. The Render Network is a market for graphics and, later, other compute jobs. People with idle GPUs do the work. People who want a frame or a model pay. OTOY, the company behind a rendering tool used in film, started the network. RENDER is the token the payment is denominated in. It is not the GPU, and it is not SOL.
What is Solana (SOL)? is the ledger the new token sits on. Ethereum without the jargon is the ledger the old one still sits on. This page is the difference.
Two tickers, one upgrade
RNDR was an ERC-20 on Ethereum. A community vote moved the network’s token to Solana and named the new one RENDER. The upgrade is one RNDR for one RENDER, through the foundation’s own page, and the RNDR is burned as the RENDER is delivered. RNDR that you have not upgraded is still RNDR. It still moves on Ethereum. The foundation has said its attention is on RENDER. Attention is not a forced migration. A small Polygon copy of RNDR was issued for a short time and then deprecated. That copy is a third token. A site that says upgrade and asks for a recovery phrase is not the foundation’s page. A wallet signature is not a handshake.
Solana addresses and Ethereum addresses do not receive each other. The wrong network is still the wrong city. Match the token a long-standing explorer has shown since the upgrade, not a ticker in a chat.
Paying for a job burns the token. Emissions mint more
Under the model the network calls burn-and-mint equilibrium, a completed job is paid in RENDER and that payment is burned. Separately, the network mints RENDER on a schedule holders have voted, and pays it to operators and to the foundation. The first voted year was about 9.1 million RENDER. A later year was a smaller number. Those are budgets. They are not a fixed cap, and they are not a dividend of the work. If more is burned than minted, the supply falls. If more is minted than burned, it rises. A widget that still quotes only the old Ethereum supply is missing half the story.
A job that fails is a job that failed. It is not a halt of Solana. The person who did the compute is not your employee, and the token does not give you a share of their machine. Nothing here is an instruction to buy RENDER, to upgrade, or to rent a GPU.
