Blockcast Raises $2.85M Led By Lattice Fund

We are excited to announce that Blockcast has raised $2.85M led by Lattice Fund. The round also included participation from Protocol Labs, Finality Capital Partners, AllianceDAO, Zee Prime Capital, RW3 Ventures, and angel investors such as Anatoly Yakovenko, founder of Solana.

Blockcast’s Mission to Decentralize Content Delivery

Content delivery networks (CDN) are the backbone of internet infrastructure. Without the capacity provided by these massive global networks, the internet we know and love today, the internet that gives us streaming video and game downloads and immersive experiences, wouldn’t really be possible. That makes content delivery a core infrastructure.

However, a handful of companies control this infrastructure for scaling content delivery over the Internet — many of whom it's not their primary business and are limited to where they can build out points of presence (PoPs). This creates an operational and financial bottleneck—users in remote areas serviced by smaller ISPs might get a far less desirable experience when accessing media online. Even in urban areas, ISPs are constantly strained by record-setting audiences demanding higher bitrate content and major content and game releases that can choke up their network. With the metaverse, VR, and XR touted as the next big thing, content services can’t deliver live streams at 4K. More than ever before, network operators and content providers are looking for ways to increase capacity to serve more users with the high-quality experience they expect.

We believe that infrastructure crucial to our everyday lives, like cellular, ISP, and content delivery networks, shouldn’t be controlled by just a few companies. Thankfully, the growth of DePIN projects like Helium and Dawn Internet have shown that these centralized services can be decentralized by enabling everyday users to participate in building that infrastructure using token rewards. Doing so allows everyday people to help extend infrastructure, often into underserved geographies where centralized operators can’t do so profitably. However, with content delivery specifically, all of the users helping to deliver content to their communities are also increasing the internet's capacity, ensuring that more and higher quality content can be consumed at lower cost.

Blockcast’s mission is to empower anyone to access enriching media experiences anywhere in the world. We achieve our mission by enabling the decentralization of CDN while increasing the overall available capacity through user-installed infrastructure and more efficient delivery methods like multicast.

Our Progress

So far, we’ve manifested our mission through:

• Blockcast RECEIVER node — a downloadable caching node and multicast receiver to boost streaming quality and download speeds while also earning weekly rewards validating coverage
• Blockcast CAST node — an enterprise-grade mid-tier caching node that sits at ISP, Broadcasters, or public transit exchange points that have sufficient capacity or multicast coverage to reach a large number of users
• Blockcast RELAY node — a secure public edge cache node that enables operators to participate in content delivery and retransmit streams to increase multicast coverage
• Blockcast CDN Federation — Interconnection protocols to offload and route traffic from other CDNs and content services
• Multicast Adaptive HTTP Proxy — a network appliance run by CAST nodes to facilitate RECEIVER node access to existing web services over shared multicast streams.
• Automatic Multicast Tunneling (AMT) — a protocol that uses UDP-based encapsulation to tunnel multicast data over a unicast network and extend coverage.
• Partner PoCs — we have established private PoCs with major technology, content, and distribution partners.

“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.”

- Mike Zajko, Partner at Lattice Fund

Going Forward

This is just the beginning. We plan to continue advancing our mission by:

• Launching PoPs with the community to receive broadcasts in strategic high-density urban locations and ISPs such as university campuses where multicast can manifest its superpower.
• Working with content partners on public beta for traffic across the Blockcast Network
• Decentralized node quality proofs for backhaul, uptime, and multicast reach
• Test network for CDN service contracts and delivery verification on-chain
• Main network for CDNs to interconnect and offer their capacity and offload to the Blockcast network

Thanks for all your support so far! If you’re excited about what we’re building at Blockcast and want to work with us, we’d love to hear from you on our page!