Blockcast has secured $2.85 million in funds to build a community-driven content delivery network on Solana, and scale internet capacity.
Blockcast successfully completed a $2.85 million seed funding round led by Lattice Fund, along with participants like Protocol Labs, Finality Capital Partners, and Anatoly Yakovenko, founder of Solana.
The funds will be used to accelerate the development of its platform and a new generation of highly scalable content delivery networks (CDNs) capable of meeting the increasing demand for higher bitrate live streams, software updates, games, and media releases.
Built on Solana, Blockcast seeks to address the internet capacity crunch and tap into direct-to-consumer content broadcasting. According to Cisco’s Annual Internet Report (2023), the global internet traffic is growing consistently by 24% annually, and live streaming now accounting for 17% of all traffic—having increased fifteen fold in the past five years.
Blockcast believes it is well-positioned to redefine the future of community driven networks with Solana’s strong ecosystem of decentralised physical infrastructure (DePIN) projects. The company has developed an approach that combines traditional broadcasting technology with internet streaming.
This innovative solution enables efficient high-bandwidth content delivery to large audiences, allowing users to access higher-quality content, such as 4K live sports, with significantly reduced data consumption, rebuffering, and latency. This approach not only enhances the user experience, but also alleviates congestion for internet service providers (ISPs), and drastically lowers content delivery costs for content owners.
At its core, Blockcast recognises that the existing content delivery model is fundamentally an incentive alignment problem among content delivery networks (CDNs), ISPs, and content owners. By leveraging blockchain technology, Blockcast makes deploying highly scalable traffic servers closer to users easy and profitable, paving the way for a more efficient and sustainable internet ecosystem.
Mike Zajko, Partner at Lattice Fund, stated, “The internet’s current infrastructure is struggling to meet the insatiable demand for high-fidelity content. Blockcast’s innovative approach of using community-operated nodes offers an exciting & practical solution. We believe Blockcast will play a critical role in reshaping how data is distributed and consumed, and we are thrilled to be backing them.”
Omar Ramadan, CEO of Blockcast, added, “A lot of work was put into meeting the security and service-level agreement (SLA) requirements that major streaming platforms need to serve content from these networks. I’m genuinely excited to bring this to communities and the increased access to services it will provide.”
With this new funding, the company is also launching a pre-order campaign for its home RELAY nodes, which are compact servers that connect to home routers and wall sockets. These nodes enhance streaming quality in your home while allowing you to participate in delivering content over the internet and earn weekly rewards.
