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Animica 9.0.0: GPU Studios and on-chain IOU settlement at block 50,000

Jul 18, 2026

Animica 9.0.0 adds three GPU products to animica.dev and makes every service IOU payable from the block reward.

GPU Studios. All three are dispatch-only through the existing media queue; no model or renderer runs on the gateway.

  • Video Studio (/video): upscale (Real-ESRGAN 2×/4×), frame interpolation (RIFE, ffmpeg fallback), auto subtitles (Whisper → SRT, soft or burned), background removal, auto-shorts.
  • Audio Studio (/audio): stem separation and vocal isolation (HDemucs), enhancement, mastering with LUFS presets.
  • Render Farm (/render): upload a packed .blend; frames are split into chunk jobs rendered across GPU miners (Blender 4.2.9, auto-fetched, sha256-pinned, always --disable-autoexec because untrusted files must never auto-run scripts), then assembled to MP4 or a frames zip.

Each job kind carries a fixed IOU reward in ANM (for example 3 ANM for an upscale, 2.5 ANM per render chunk) and a lease length; rewards are env-overridable per kind. Large inputs and results moved off inline base64 in Postgres to a disk-backed upload store (512 MB video/blend, 200 MB audio) with streamed artifacts, per-kind leases and progress heartbeats.

On-chain IOU settlement (the 50,000 fork). The consensus mechanism already in tree — consensus/iou_settlement.py, hooked into block import under FORK_VPN_RELAY_REWARDS = FORK_IOU_SETTLEMENT at mainnet 50,000 — is now exercised. Settlement anchors are ordinary treasury-signed transfer transactions carrying ANMSETL1 plus a JSON payout list. Blocks at or after 50,000 carve the anchored payouts from the miner subsidy (never minted), capped at 50 ANM per block halving with emission — a constant 16.67% of the subsidy, always under the 20% ceiling. Tests cover strict parse/encode round-trips, authority binding, the cap and scale invariants (miner plus settlement equals the pre-fork miner output), the ≤ 20% invariant across halvings, pre-fork inertness and non-interference with pinned checkpoints.

Around it: an animica settle CLI to build, inspect and post anchors from the operator wallet, refusing anchors over the cap or before the fork height; a gateway settlement worker on a systemd timer that reads the marketplace IOU ledgers (media miners, VPN exits, hosting pins), computes payable amounts of at least 5 ANM and posts one anchor per cycle only at or after the fork height; and settledNanm columns so accrued versus settled is visible on the register/me endpoints.

Also fixed: a NameError in the image-generation OOM downshift path that crashed instead of retrying.