The Cocoon Network and the Silence Around It

The Cocoon network has been live for about a week now. It promises GPU owners the ability to earn TON by supplying computing power for AI workloads.

I kept waiting for the first real feedback. But there is none. No comments from users who consume these services, and none from people who supposedly earn money by providing their GPUs. That leaves me with some questions: is anyone actually using this network at all? And is there anyone who is really making money there?

To join Cocoon and start earning, you need quite expensive hardware. The minimum requirement is an H100 GPU, and ideally something even more powerful. If you own hardware like that, you almost certainly already have ways to put it to work without Cocoon. Otherwise, why buy it in the first place? So I genuinely do not understand who these people are that are contributing their computing power to the network. And on the other side: who are the customers? What kind of AI is being run there? Why are these mysterious users completely silent and not telling their stories?

There is also a separate issue with payments, which are made in TON. I suspect that the creators of the Cocoon network themselves have access to massive amounts of TON obtained at little or no cost. If the network creators are also the main users - the developers of the very AI that Cocoon is supposed to support - then the exchange looks fundamentally unbalanced.

This reminds me of an episode from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, where an industrialist is asked to work for the benefit of the government. The government promises to pay him whatever he wants, but only in its own currency - a currency it can print in unlimited quantities. The industrialist refuses. Why spend real resources in exchange for something that costs the payer nothing? That is not a fair deal.

If the creators are merely intermediaries, then the entire scheme only works if the end users also pay in TON purchased on the open market. But do they? I have no idea. Everything is far too opaque.

It is entirely possible that there is no real activity on the Cocoon network at all. And that all the hype around it is just as fake as the claims that staking TON could get you a UAE golden visa. In that case, at least the TON Foundation's statements were quickly debunked by three UAE government authorities. And who can actually disprove claims that Cocoon is operating, if neither network participants nor customers are visible?