Solana’s Pipe Network Disrupts ISP Monopolies—Now Pays Users for Decentralized Bandwidth

Web3’s answer to Big Telecom just leveled up. Pipe Network, the Solana-based decentralized internet protocol, now rewards users with crypto for sharing bandwidth—turning Comcast’s worst nightmare into a tokenized reality.

How it works: The protocol aggregates unused residential bandwidth (your idle Wi-Fi) into a peer-to-peer mesh network. Users earn PIPE tokens for participation while bypassing legacy ISP throttling. Early adopters report 3x faster speeds than traditional providers in latency tests—though skeptics note the ’decentralized’ claims still rely on AWS nodes.

The catch? Tokenomics resemble a telecom Ponzi—early backers get richer as later users pay their rewards. But with 47% of U.S. counties stuck with one ISP monopoly, even a half-decentralized alternative might be worth the gas fees.

Pipe Network wants to build the internet on Solana

The ultimate goal of the initiative is to build a scalable ecosystem where users can share data, stream content, and do everything they currently do online, but using decentralized infrastructure, without relying on the expensive data centers run by big tech firms.

One of the main advantages of the Pipe Network is that it enables almost any device to be turned into a Point of Presence node. This means that owners of personal computers, laptops, or even mobile devices can use idle computing power to earn rewards and power the network.

Additionally, the proximity of these smaller nodes to end users can reduce latency. In theory, this means faster ping times and quicker content loading for users. David Rhodus, founder of Permissionless Labs, the company behind Pipe Network, explained its benefits during the Token2049 event:

“We’re excited to make our testnet available to the wider Solana community to demonstrate how a decentralized CDN can increase bandwidth and reduce latency beyond what has been possible with off-chain solutions,” David Rhodus, Permissionless Labs.

So far, the network boasts over 200,000 PoP nodes, or individual devices onboarded. These devices were used to upload more than 200,000 files and store a cumulative 250 Terabytes of data.