Multicoin: Pipe Network, the first dCDN on Solana

Author: Kyle Samani, Managing Partner of Multicoin Capital; Compiler: 0xjs@黄金财经

The first large-scale P2P application on the Internet was Napster (email/SMTP was designed to be P2P and self-hosted, but in fact ended up being federated). The spiritual successor to Napster is the BitTorrent protocol, which at its peak accounted for ~25-35% of all Internet traffic in the mid-2000s. Both are permissionless: anyone can host any file.

The commonality between Napster and BitTorrent is file sharing. This is quite intuitive. Anyone can host a file, and everyone has uploads and downloads. Therefore, it naturally makes sense to distribute popular files from people who already have the file nearby. File sharing naturally fits into the P2P architecture.

But this is not how the vast majority of files on the Internet are distributed. Instead, files are mainly distributed through content distribution networks (CDNs), which are distributed to some extent (but not decentralized) and are permissioned. The world’s largest CDNs have 200-400 points of presence (POPs), mostly in the US and Europe.

A decentralized CDN (dCDN) built on crypto has always been an obvious opportunity.In theory, dCDNs should be able to provide lower latency and more redundancy at a lower cost due to structural cost arbitrage on severely underutilized upload bandwidth. There were many early attempts during 2016-2020 that ultimately failed. We have been looking to invest in dCDNs since Multicoin was founded in 2017.

On September 16, 2024, we are excited to announce our $10 million Series A investment in Permissionless Labs, the developer of Pipe Network. Pipe Network is the first permissionless content delivery network (CDN) on Solana. This round also included participation from Solana Ventures, Robot Ventures, and our friends Anatoly Yakovenko and Meltem Demirors. We believe Pipe Network has the potential to become the largest and fastest CDN in the world because it is inherently permissionless, designed for drastically lower latency, and built on the most efficient crypto rails. CDNs are inherently performance-sensitive applications. With the right orchestration, decentralized CDNs should be able to outperform centralized CDNs (cCDNs). However, building an orchestration layer to support a permissionless environment is difficult and new. Building a dCDN requires a team with deep domain knowledge. We believe we have found the right team in David Rhodus, founder and CEO. David has a 20-year career in streaming and big data. Prior to founding Pipe Network, he served as CTO of early streaming company Volar Video. He later became an early employee at Elemental Technologies, which built some of the earliest large-scale HD broadcast infrastructure for the NFL and other similar media properties. Elemental was eventually acquired by AWS and is now an integral part of its video streaming platform. He then became an early employee at Consensys, where he learned about permissionless crypto networks from first principles. We believe David and his team have the perfect background to do the necessary low-level optimizations to make a permissionless dCDN outperform a permissioned cCDN.

In addition to the team’s pedigree, we invested in Pipe because of their focus. There are many teams in the Decentralized Virtual Infrastructure Network (DeVIN) space that are trying to do a lot of things. For example, CDNs have many adjacent functions, including archival storage and data computation. From the moment we met David, he was on a mission to build the world’s largest and fastest CDN. As David likes to say, the vision for Pipe Network is 3ms+ speed of light response times.

Pipe Network is about to launch its private beta and open the testnet to Pipe POP node operators. The first public demonstration of Pipe Network will be held at Breakpoint, Solana's annual developer conference in Singapore (September 20-21).