Building the Future of Internet Infrastructure: How Pipe Network is Revolutionizing Content Delivery on Solana

The internet as we know it relies on invisible infrastructure that most users never think about. When you stream a movie on Netflix, watch a live sports event, or load a website, content delivery networks (CDNs) work behind the scenes to ensure that data reaches you quickly and reliably. For the past 25 years, companies like Akamai and Cloudflare have dominated this space, operating from centralized data centers that, while effective, have inherent limitations in speed and latency. Now, a new player is emerging from the Solana ecosystem with a radical proposition: what if we could decentralize content delivery, making it not just faster and cheaper, but also more censorship-resistant?

Top Projects

Lulo

Score: 7,586.13

Bonk

Score: 4,806.12

Sphere

Score: 2,544.42

Moonwalk

Score: 2,026.11

David Rhodus, the founder of Pipe Network, joins the Mid-Curve Podcast to discuss how his decades of experience in the video streaming industry led him to build what he describes as a next-generation CDN that operates 10x faster than existing competitors. With a background that includes building streaming infrastructure later acquired by Amazon and architecting the video systems for Amazon Prime Video, Rhodus brings deep expertise to a problem that most of us don't even know exists. His conversation with host Hayden Tutsui reveals the ambitious scope of Pipe Network's vision and its integration with Jito's restaking infrastructure—a collaboration that promises to bring enterprise-grade content delivery to the decentralized world.

From Insurance Systems to Streaming Innovation

David Rhodus's journey into video streaming began, surprisingly, in the mundane world of health insurance software. Working on migrating insurance systems off mainframes, Rhodus found himself bored and searching for something more exciting. Around the same time, the concept of "big data" was emerging in tech journals, and Rhodus realized he had been dealing with massive datasets for years without recognizing the cutting-edge nature of his work. This realization, combined with the nascent state of online video technology, sparked his transition into the streaming industry.

In the early days, online video barely worked. Real Media Player was the dominant format, and Apple had not yet released the HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) standard that would later become foundational to internet video. Rhodus saw this as an opportunity for innovation and jumped in headfirst. His first video startup focused on streaming high school sports, eventually signing up over 10,000 high schools across America. The business model was elegant: stream the games, insert advertisements, and split the revenue with the schools. Some larger schools in football-crazy states like Texas and Alabama were pulling in $50,000 a month from ad revenue alone.

This early venture led to one of Rhodus's more consequential innovations—one that many viewers might actually resent. He developed the technology to insert advertising into live streaming video, a capability that has since become ubiquitous across the internet. "People probably hate this but I created a way to insert advertising into live streaming," Rhodus admits with a hint of self-awareness. The success of this venture attracted acquisition interest from companies looking to bring this media to cable boxes, and Rhodus moved on to his next challenge.

The Road to Amazon Acquisition

After selling his first startup, Rhodus joined a team of engineers who were working on something remarkably ahead of its time: using GPUs for video encoding before even Nvidia fully understood the potential of their hardware for such applications. These engineers had built server appliances with video encoding capabilities, but Rhodus saw a bigger opportunity. He proposed moving the software into the cloud, specifically into AWS. His colleagues thought he was crazy, but they let him try.

The rewrite took about six months, and the results were transformative. Within two to three months of launching the cloud-based service, most major broadcasters—BBC, ABC, Fox, and even Amazon Video itself—had become customers. The platform's success created an amusing problem: Amazon's bill for using the service grew to approximately $60,000 per day. Rather than continue paying such enormous fees, Amazon simply called and said they wanted to acquire the company. As Rhodus recalls, "They're like, we're not going to pay the bill. We want to acquire the company." This led to his tenure at AWS, where he worked on the streaming architecture for Amazon Prime Video.

At Amazon, Rhodus gained invaluable insights into the complexities of content delivery at scale. One of his first tasks was integrating the video encoding stack deeply into Amazon's S3 storage system. This experience taught him the intricacies of large-scale storage systems and, importantly, exposed him to candid conversations with Amazon engineers about what they wished they had done differently. "Things some of the coolest things was like how honest the engineers were and they're like, 'I wish we had done this' or 'wish we hadn't done this,'" Rhodus explains. These learnings would later inform the architecture of Pipe Network's own storage solution.

Understanding the Traditional CDN Landscape

The content delivery network industry has existed for approximately 25 years, with Akamai remaining the largest and arguably the most reliable provider. Founded by MIT computer scientists trying to make the internet faster, Akamai built a reputation for reliability that has endured for decades. As Rhodus puts it, there's a common saying in the industry: "No one ever got fired for hiring Akamai or paying Akamai." When it comes to streaming critical events like the NFL Super Bowl, enterprises trust Akamai because it simply works.

However, even the most sophisticated streaming infrastructures don't rely on a single CDN. Rhodus's experience at Amazon revealed that even companies with multi-billion dollar CDN operations of their own use multiple external providers. "When I was at Amazon we were working on deploying live streaming into their like Amazon video stack. We used I think six different CDNs at the time," he recalls. This diversity exists because no single CDN company can fulfill all requirements across every geographic region and network condition.

The fundamental limitation of traditional CDNs lies in their physical architecture. All major CDNs today still operate from data centers, which on average sit approximately 150 miles away from end users. This distance creates inherent latency because the speed of light represents an absolute physical limit that cannot be overcome. While 50 to 80 milliseconds of latency might seem insignificant, it has real-world consequences. Users attempting to stream 4K video often experience quality degradation, with the stream automatically downsampling to 1080p or lower because the CDN cannot deliver data fast enough to maintain the highest quality.

The Pipe Network Architecture

Pipe Network represents a fundamental rethinking of content delivery architecture. Instead of operating from centralized data centers, Pipe Network coordinates hundreds of thousands of nodes distributed around the world, caching data at the neighborhood level. This hyper-local approach dramatically reduces the distance between the content and the user, which in turn slashes latency. The network currently achieves average latencies of around 10 milliseconds—compared to 50-80 milliseconds for competitors like Cloudflare and Akamai.

The physics behind this improvement relates to something called the bandwidth delay product (BDP). As Rhodus explains, "Basically as the distance between the data and the user gets shorter, the latency... today we see 10 milliseconds kind of on average in our network." This reduced latency doesn't just mean content arrives faster; it also enables significantly higher bandwidth throughput. When the round-trip time between client and server decreases, the effective bandwidth of the connection increases dramatically, allowing for better quality video streams and faster data transfers.

Coordinating hundreds of thousands of distributed nodes presents obvious challenges, and this is where blockchain technology enters the picture. Rhodus admits that before exploring Pipe Network, he and his team were "generally kind of negative about blockchain"—viewing it as too volatile and speculative. However, the technology proved to be an ideal solution for their coordination problem. Blockchain provides the infrastructure to manage payments, verify work, and enforce behavior across a massive network of permissionless participants scattered around the globe.

The Challenge of Permissionless Infrastructure

Operating a permissionless network introduces unique security challenges that don't exist in traditional centralized systems. Anyone can download the Pipe Network software and run it on their Mac or Windows computer, participating in the network without prior approval. This openness is essential for achieving the decentralization and geographic coverage the network requires, but it also means dealing with heterogeneous hardware, unreliable operators, and potentially malicious actors.

Rhodus describes the incentive structure as having both carrots and sticks. Nodes are paid for participating and performing well, creating positive incentives for good behavior. But the network also needs mechanisms to handle nodes that start misbehaving or attempting to exploit the system. "There's a lot of really cool things you can do if the node starts misbehaving and harming the customers, like slashing them and kind of taking their collateral back," Rhodus explains.

The network implements a tiered ranking system to identify high-quality nodes. Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, Rhodus notes, "We're pretty uncreative so we just call it like gold, silver, bronze." A gold node demonstrates consistently low latency and high throughput over approximately a week of operation. Once a node achieves this status, it makes sense to route more priority bandwidth through it and allow it to stake more collateral. Enterprise customers like Amazon or Warner Brothers, for whom brand reputation is paramount, are willing to pay premium prices for guaranteed delivery through these highest-tier nodes.

Integration with Jito Restaking

The collaboration between Pipe Network and Jito represents a significant milestone for both projects. Jito's restaking infrastructure provides the security mechanisms and staking workflows that Pipe Network needs without requiring the team to build everything from scratch. Rhodus describes this as "a very nice blessing of technology with the staking vaults and things like that for projects like ours that are kind of lightly built on top of a blockchain, but not like super integrated."

By the time this podcast episode goes live, a liquid staked pipe token called "LovePipe" will have launched. This token represents staked positions in the Pipe Network through Jito's restaking system, allowing participants to earn rewards for supporting the network's infrastructure while maintaining liquidity. The integration exemplifies how Solana's ecosystem enables novel infrastructure projects to leverage existing security and economic mechanisms rather than building entirely new systems.

The staking dynamics in Pipe Network differ somewhat from validator staking in Solana itself. While there are concerns in the Solana validator space about stake concentration—where a few nodes could accumulate most of the stake and revenue—Pipe Network's model is inherently more distributed. The network estimates it will need between two and five million nodes to cover most of the planet within 10-millisecond latency. This scale requirement makes it difficult for any single operator to dominate, even with significant capital.

Fire Storage: Decentralized Storage Done Right

Pipe Network's storage solution, Fire Storage, emerged from frustrations with existing decentralized storage systems. While projects in the space had demonstrated that decentralized storage was technically possible, their read availability was severely lacking. Rhodus describes the problem: "I could upload a file to some of these systems and it might take five minutes before I can get the first byte back." For any serious business application, such delays are unacceptable.

The team's experience at AWS, particularly their deep integration with S3, provided a blueprint for building a better system. Amazon engineers had shared candid assessments of S3's design decisions—what worked well and what they wished they had done differently. Rhodus took these learnings and applied them to designing Fire Storage, creating a system that not only stores data in a distributed manner but can also retrieve it extremely quickly.

The relationship between Fire Storage and the CDN mirrors the architecture of traditional cloud providers. AWS, for example, has S3 for storage but requires CloudFront CDN to wrap around it when serving content to large numbers of concurrent users. S3 alone can't sustain more than a few thousand simultaneous readers. Fire Storage and the Pipe CDN work together in the same way—storage provides persistence while the CDN provides high-throughput delivery. However, Pipe Network maintains full interoperability with Amazon S3, so customers who want to keep their existing storage infrastructure can still benefit from Pipe's CDN.

P1: Optimized Routing for the Public Internet

Beyond content delivery and storage, Pipe Network has developed a routing layer called P1 that optimizes data transmission across the public internet. This represents a different approach than projects like Double Zero, which are building private internet infrastructure. Instead of laying new fiber or establishing dedicated network connections, P1 creates a software-defined networking layer on top of existing public internet infrastructure.

With nodes distributed globally, Pipe Network has real-time telemetry about internet conditions worldwide. When certain areas or ISPs experience slowdowns or outages, P1 can route data through the mesh of pop nodes to avoid these bottlenecks. "We basically built a layer on top of the internet," Rhodus explains. "It's like a software defined networking layer, and that allows us to... route data through our mesh of pop nodes much faster than the internet can do natively."

The public internet, while remarkable in its resilience and accessibility, lacks optimized routing. It was designed to survive catastrophic events—as Rhodus puts it, "it tries to like take the path of like World War three or something like so that it will stay up forever." But this design prioritizes robustness over efficiency. P1 addresses this gap by finding optimal paths through Pipe Network's distributed infrastructure, delivering data faster than standard internet routing would allow.

Serving Solana's Data Infrastructure

Pipe Network has become an important piece of Solana's data infrastructure, hosting the blockchain's entire history—approximately 400 million blocks representing over a petabyte and a half of data. This data is served for free, permissionlessly, through a simple API. The decision to make this free wasn't purely altruistic; it served as a crucial load test for the network. "We wanted that load test," Rhodus admits. "And I don't know, I hear a lot of... people on Twitter complain about the cost of accessing Solana data and I thought if we've got the whole thing that's like very unique, let's make it free."

The usage has been substantial. Rhodus reports seeing six to eight gigabits per second continuously as users read the block history. Additionally, Pipe Network hosts Solana validator snapshots, which help new validators hydrate their accounts and ledger data quickly. This snapshot distribution alone generates two to three hundred terabytes of downloads per day, demonstrating the significant infrastructure demands of the Solana ecosystem.

This Solana data hosting has served as what Rhodus calls their "meme coin test"—a real-world load test that helped identify hot spots and issues in the network that might not have appeared under lighter conditions. The read layer for Solana has historically been underserved, with accessing historical data often proving difficult or expensive. While Pipe Network typically runs two to three seconds behind the chain tip (not optimized for real-time queries), it provides a valuable service for applications that need to access historical transaction data, DeFi swaps, and other blockchain records.

ZK Proofs: Verifying Bandwidth in a Trustless System

Verifying that nodes actually serve the bandwidth they claim to serve represents one of the most challenging problems in building a decentralized CDN. Pipe Network needed a way to prove, cryptographically, that data had been transmitted without adding significant overhead to the transmission itself. The team initially hoped to leverage existing technology like zkTLS (zero-knowledge TLS), which has gained popularity in the Web3 space for verifying web data.

However, zkTLS proved unsuitable for Pipe Network's needs. While innovative, it adds an extra handshake in the networking process, which conflicts with the network's goal of delivering data as quickly as possible. As Rhodus explains, "We're trying to deliver data crazy fast and it just wasn't really designed for what we needed."

Instead, the team developed custom solutions they call zkTCP and zkQuick (for the QUIC protocol). These systems leverage the unique properties of the TCP stack, including sequence numbers, and incorporate frame data about what's being transmitted into zero-knowledge proofs. This approach guarantees that nodes have actually served the bandwidth they claim to have served, while also enabling decentralized payments based on verified work.

The implementation works as follows: pop nodes generate proofs based on the data they serve and post these proofs to a centralized API. Anyone can then run a verifier against these proofs and confirm they're valid. Once verified, the node can be compensated for its work. Rhodus acknowledges the desire to decentralize this verification process over time but notes that writing proofs directly to the blockchain felt too burdensome for the current product focus on speed.

Use Cases: From Video Streaming to Defense Applications

While approximately 80% of CDN industry revenue still comes from video streaming, Pipe Network's low-latency architecture opens up use cases that traditional CDNs cannot serve. Gaming represents one obvious application—shooting games and other latency-sensitive applications benefit tremendously from 10-millisecond response times compared to 50-80 milliseconds.

Sports betting presents another compelling use case that Rhodus hadn't originally considered. Time-locking of live streams is critical for betting applications; if one viewer sees a play outcome before another, it creates opportunities for exploitation. The prediction market boom on platforms like Polymarket suggests significant demand for low-latency access to real-time information. "That's a super fascinating concept," Rhodus acknowledges. "I've never been like a big trader or anything... but I definitely think all these trading markets on the blockchain are fascinating."

One of the more unexpected applications came from a developer controlling food delivery robots in Singapore remotely. "We're like, oh that's so cool. Like you're driving a robot using our CDN because the latency is low enough," Rhodus recounts. Such applications emerged organically because the latency was low enough to enable real-time remote control—something that wouldn't work reliably with traditional CDN latencies.

Perhaps most notably, Pipe Network's performance exceeds Department of Defense C2C (computer-to-computer) latency requirements. These military specifications exist for applications like weapons systems where milliseconds matter. Rhodus's previous experience working with Air Force and Navy projects at an earlier startup gave him familiarity with these stringent requirements. While he's not aware of current defense applications being built on Pipe Network, the capability exists for such uses.

Censorship Resistance and Content Moderation

The question of censorship resistance represents both an opportunity and a challenge for Pipe Network. Rhodus describes significant inbound interest from applications wanting to post opinions or content that might face restrictions on traditional platforms. The desire for a "censorship-resistant YouTube" reflects real demand from users frustrated with content moderation policies on major platforms.

Rhodus positions himself as "very much pro pro-speech kind of person, living in the US and enjoying the capitalism." However, he's also pragmatic about the challenges. The host, Hayden Tutsui, raises the practical concern that hosting objectionable content—even if philosophically defensible—creates real brand and business problems for platforms. The Pump.fun controversy on Solana, where live streams featured inappropriate content, illustrates the tension between permissionless infrastructure and market realities.

Pipe Network has experimental edge compute capabilities on its nodes that could theoretically run lightweight machine learning models for content screening. However, Rhodus notes that AI-based content moderation has become "super circular"—the biases and judgments embedded in AI systems raise their own questions about censorship. Traditional broadcast media has handled similar concerns through time delays, allowing human moderators to intervene before problematic content reaches viewers. A one-second delay might increase latency but could enable content moderation for applications that need it.

The DePIN Opportunity and Market Landscape

Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) represent one of the most exciting opportunities in cryptocurrency, yet Rhodus observes that no project has achieved a true "knockout" success yet. Some projects have traction, but none are fundamentally reinventing their industries at scale. This creates enormous opportunity for teams that can execute well.

Rhodus offers a contrarian view on token distribution in DePIN projects. He observes that many projects have been "very liberal initially" with their token distribution, dispersing too much of the network too early in an attempt to grow. This approach can undermine long-term sustainability and alignment of incentives. The challenge of designing optimal tokenomics for DePIN projects remains an open research problem.

Cloudflare's market capitalization of approximately $74.5 billion provides a reference point for the scale of opportunity in content delivery. This single company, representing just one player in the CDN market, commands tens of billions in value. Traditional CDN is massive—growing approximately 25% year over year—and represents critical infrastructure that most users never think about. If Pipe Network can capture even a small percentage of this market while adding the benefits of decentralization, the economic opportunity is substantial.

The Learning Curve Challenge

One obstacle facing DePIN adoption is the steep learning curve for potential participants and investors. Understanding how these networks function requires grappling with concepts like burning and minting, burn-mint equilibrium, and various staking models. Following Helium's HIPs (Helium Improvement Proposals), for example, proves challenging even for motivated observers.

Tutsui notes that he believes burn-mint equilibrium could be a model that many crypto projects converge on, not just DePIN projects. But internalizing these concepts takes time and effort. The complexity creates a barrier to entry that may slow adoption even when the underlying technology works well.

Questions about optimal staking models, inflation schedules, and how different economic mechanisms interact with specific DePIN use cases remain open. Different applications may require different approaches, and the ecosystem is still experimenting to find what works. This uncertainty represents both a challenge and an opportunity for teams willing to innovate on the economic design side.

The Path Forward

Pipe Network's integration with Jito marks an important step in bringing institutional-grade infrastructure to decentralized systems. The LovePipe liquid staking token provides a mechanism for the community to support network growth while maintaining liquidity, and the collaboration demonstrates how Solana's ecosystem can enable novel infrastructure projects.

The company's three-product approach—CDN, Fire Storage, and P1 routing—creates a comprehensive stack for content delivery. While each component is complex and challenging to build, they benefit synergistically from each other. The CDN and P1 routing layer are "married together very intimately," as Rhodus describes, while Fire Storage provides the persistence layer that CDN delivery requires.

With the Solana ecosystem's data infrastructure needs growing rapidly, Pipe Network's free hosting of blockchain history and validator snapshots creates goodwill and demonstrates capability. The network's ability to handle the load of Solana's data demands validates its readiness for enterprise workloads. As Rhodus notes, "The Solana ecosystem has been really fun. I think if I was to frame it, Solana like the snapshots and stuff have been like our meme coin test, like our load test on the network, and it helped us find a lot of hot spots and fix things."

The Decentralized Infrastructure Revolution

Pipe Network represents a broader trend of infrastructure moving toward decentralization. Just as Solana itself decentralizes computation and state management, Pipe Network decentralizes content delivery. The pattern suggests a future where the fundamental layers of internet infrastructure operate on decentralized networks coordinated by blockchain technology.

For developers and businesses, this shift promises faster performance, lower costs, and greater resilience. For users, it means better streaming quality, faster load times, and—potentially—more freedom from platform-level content restrictions. The 10-millisecond latency that Pipe Network achieves isn't just a technical benchmark; it enables entirely new categories of applications that couldn't exist with traditional CDN architecture.

The collaboration between Pipe Network and Jito exemplifies how Solana's ecosystem enables innovation. By providing restaking infrastructure and security mechanisms, Jito allows Pipe Network to focus on its core competency—building exceptional content delivery infrastructure—rather than creating economic systems from scratch. This composability, where specialized teams can build on each other's work, accelerates the pace of innovation across the ecosystem.

Conclusion

David Rhodus's journey from health insurance systems to building cutting-edge decentralized infrastructure illustrates the serendipitous nature of technological innovation. The skills developed in mundane contexts—handling large datasets, building reliable systems—prove applicable in ways that weren't foreseeable at the time. His experience building infrastructure acquired by Amazon and running at AWS scale provides credibility and practical knowledge that directly applies to Pipe Network's challenges.

The CDN industry, despite being invisible to most users, represents massive infrastructure spend and forms a critical layer of the internet stack. Traditional providers like Cloudflare and Akamai have served the industry well, but their centralized data center architecture imposes fundamental limitations. Pipe Network's approach—distributing nodes to the neighborhood level and coordinating them via blockchain—addresses these limitations in a fundamental way.

As Solana continues to grow and the demand for its data infrastructure increases, projects like Pipe Network become increasingly important. The free hosting of Solana's blockchain history and validator snapshots provides immediate value to the ecosystem while demonstrating Pipe Network's capabilities. The integration with Jito's restaking infrastructure adds economic security and enables community participation through the LovePipe token.

The future of internet infrastructure may well run on decentralized networks like Pipe. With performance that exceeds DOD requirements, architecture that enables censorship resistance, and integration with Solana's economic systems, Pipe Network is positioning itself at the forefront of this transformation. For builders and users alike, this represents an opportunity to participate in reshaping how the internet's fundamental infrastructure operates.

Facts + Figures

• Pipe Network achieves approximately 10 milliseconds average latency, compared to 50-80 milliseconds for traditional CDNs like Cloudflare and Akamai
• Cloudflare's current market capitalization is approximately $74.5 billion, indicating the massive scale of the CDN market opportunity
• The CDN industry revenue is approximately 80% driven by video streaming, with the market growing around 25% year over year
• Pipe Network estimates it will need between 2-5 million nodes to cover most of the planet within 10-millisecond latency
• Traditional CDNs operate from data centers approximately 150 miles away from end users on average
• Pipe Network hosts Solana's entire blockchain history: approximately 400 million blocks and over 1.5 petabytes of data
• Solana validator snapshot downloads through Pipe Network generate 200-300 terabytes of data transfer per day
• Pipe Network sees 6-8 gigabits per second of continuous traffic for Solana block history reads
• Amazon Video used six different CDNs when Rhodus was working on their live streaming deployment
• At its peak before Amazon acquisition, the video encoding platform Rhodus built was generating approximately $60,000/day in AWS bills
• Rhodus's first video streaming startup signed up over 10,000 high schools, with some larger schools earning $50,000/month from advertising revenue
• The engineers Rhodus worked with in 2007 figured out GPU-based video encoding before Nvidia fully understood the capability
• By the podcast air date (October 20, 2024), a liquid staked pipe token called "LovePipe" launched through Jito restaking
• Pipe Network's node ranking system uses "gold, silver, bronze" tiers based on approximately one week of performance data
• Pipe Network performance exceeds Department of Defense C2C (computer-to-computer) latency requirements

Questions Answered

What is Pipe Network and how does it differ from traditional CDNs?

Pipe Network is a decentralized content delivery network that distributes nodes to the neighborhood level rather than operating from centralized data centers. Traditional CDNs like Cloudflare and Akamai operate from data centers approximately 150 miles away from end users, resulting in 50-80 milliseconds of latency. Pipe Network achieves approximately 10 milliseconds latency by positioning nodes much closer to users—essentially at the neighborhood level. This reduced distance enables significantly higher bandwidth throughput due to a physics principle called bandwidth delay product, allowing for better quality video streaming and faster data transfer without the quality degradation common on traditional CDNs.

How does Pipe Network use blockchain technology?

Pipe Network uses blockchain technology to coordinate and compensate hundreds of thousands of distributed nodes around the world. The blockchain provides infrastructure for managing payments to node operators, verifying that work has been performed through zero-knowledge proofs, and enforcing good behavior through mechanisms like slashing. Because the network is permissionless—anyone can download the software and participate—blockchain provides the trustless coordination layer necessary to manage heterogeneous participants with different hardware capabilities and reliability levels. The integration with Jito's restaking infrastructure adds economic security and enables community participation through staking mechanisms.

What is the relationship between Pipe Network and Solana?

Pipe Network hosts Solana's entire blockchain history—approximately 400 million blocks and over 1.5 petabytes of data—for free through a simple API. The network also hosts validator snapshots, which help new validators quickly synchronize their accounts and ledger data, generating 200-300 terabytes of daily downloads. This data hosting serves as both a community contribution and a real-world load test for Pipe Network's infrastructure. Additionally, through integration with Jito's restaking system, users can stake tokens to support Pipe Network nodes, with the LovePipe liquid staking token launching to enable this participation.

How does Pipe Network verify that nodes actually deliver the data they claim?

Pipe Network developed custom zero-knowledge proof systems called zkTCP and zkQuick to verify bandwidth delivery without adding significant overhead. The team considered using existing zkTLS technology but found it too slow—it adds an extra handshake that conflicts with the goal of minimal latency. Instead, they leveraged properties of the TCP stack, including sequence numbers and frame data, to create proofs that nodes generate based on data they serve. These proofs are posted to an API where verifiers can confirm their validity, after which nodes receive compensation. The system ensures that nodes cannot falsely claim to have delivered bandwidth they didn't actually serve.

What use cases does Pipe Network's low latency enable?

Beyond traditional video streaming, Pipe Network's 10-millisecond latency enables applications that wouldn't work reliably with traditional CDNs. These include time-sensitive sports betting applications where stream timing must be synchronized to prevent exploitation, real-time remote control of robots (one developer uses it to control food delivery robots in Singapore), and gaming applications where milliseconds matter. The network's performance also exceeds Department of Defense C2C latency requirements for military applications. Any application that benefits from minimal delay between data request and delivery can potentially leverage Pipe Network's infrastructure.

What is Fire Storage and how does it work with the CDN?

Fire Storage is Pipe Network's decentralized storage solution, built to address the slow read availability of existing decentralized storage systems, which could take five minutes to return the first byte of uploaded data. The system was designed based on lessons learned from deep integration with Amazon S3 during Rhodus's time at AWS. Fire Storage works synergistically with the CDN—storage provides persistence while the CDN wraps around it to enable high-throughput delivery to many concurrent users. However, Pipe Network maintains full interoperability with Amazon S3, allowing customers to keep their existing storage while benefiting from Pipe's CDN.

How does Pipe Network handle content moderation concerns?

Pipe Network has experimental edge compute capabilities that could theoretically run lightweight machine learning models for content screening on its nodes. However, the approach to moderation largely depends on the applications built on top of the infrastructure. Applications can implement their own terms of service and moderation policies. For applications requiring content delay for moderation, traditional broadcast techniques like one-second delays could enable human intervention before content reaches viewers. Rhodus positions himself as pro-speech but acknowledges the practical brand and business challenges that hosting objectionable content creates.

What is P1 and how does it optimize internet routing?

P1 is Pipe Network's routing layer that optimizes data transmission across the public internet through software-defined networking. Unlike projects building private internet infrastructure, P1 works on top of existing public internet by leveraging telemetry from Pipe Network's globally distributed nodes. When certain areas or ISPs experience slowdowns or outages, P1 routes data through the mesh of pop nodes to avoid bottlenecks. This addresses a fundamental limitation of the public internet, which was designed for resilience and availability rather than optimal routing efficiency.

What is the LovePipe token and how does the Jito integration work?

LovePipe is a liquid staked token representing staked positions in Pipe Network through Jito's restaking infrastructure. The integration allows participants to earn rewards for supporting network infrastructure while maintaining liquidity rather than having tokens locked. Jito provides the staking vaults and economic mechanisms that Pipe Network leverages for node security and incentive alignment. Higher-stake nodes can receive priority bandwidth routing and serve premium enterprise customers, while the staking mechanism enables slashing of nodes that misbehave or harm customers.

How many nodes does Pipe Network need to achieve global coverage?

Pipe Network estimates it will need between 2-5 million nodes to cover most of the planet within 10-millisecond latency. This scale requirement differentiates it from systems like Solana's validator network, where stake concentration concerns exist. With millions of nodes required, it becomes difficult for any single operator to dominate even with significant capital. The network uses geographic bounties to incentivize node deployment in specific underserved areas, and customers provide feedback about regions with poor performance or insufficient bandwidth that need more nodes.