On Thursday, Akash Network’s (AKT) price surged by 12%, making it the second-highest gainer behind Book of Meme (BOME) in the cryptocurrency market. While BOME led the top 100 gainers by market cap with a 24-hour gain of over 14%, AKT traded to highs of $3.45. AKT, which is an AI-related token, outperformed other coins in this category, with only Render (RNDR) and The Graph (GRT) showing gains among the top AI and Big Data cryptocurrencies. However, SingularityNET, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol, which are headed for a merger under the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI), were all down by more than 10% at the time of writing. AKT’s all-time high was $8.07, which was reached in April 2021. In the current market cycle, the cryptocurrency peaked at $6.22 on March 10, 2024, and surged above $6.03 in April following an Upbit listing before paring gains. Despite the broader crypto market being up just 1% to about $2.29 trillion, AKT’s double-digit gain may have come from the announcement that Crypto.com now supports AKT staking with up to 19% in rewards. Additionally, the Akash team revealed a collaboration with Flock, a platform for decentralized training of AI models, which may have contributed to the positive vibes around AKT. AKT holders can participate in an open and collaborative ecosystem with FLock.io, contributing to the training of models for on-chain rewards. The RenAIssance Hackathon also offers rewards in AKT, USDC, and native FLock token FML, with the top three models in the hackathon earning 400 USDC and $400 worth of AKT for the winner, 300 USDC plus $300 worth of AKT for the runner-up, and 200 USDC plus $200 in AKT for the third-place model. Participants can also win 200 USDC and $200 worth of AKT for winning validators.