Blockcast Raises $2.85M in Quest to Scale the Internet, Backed by Anatoly Yakovenko

Blockcast, an emerging CDN (Content Delivery Network) building on Solana, has announced the successful completion of its initial seed round. 

Aiming to optimize content delivery across the internet, Blockcast’s raise attracted attention from Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, who is listed as one of the protocol’s Angel Investors.

Blockcast’s successful raise illustrates the industry’s desire to see emerging startups meet the growing demand for more scalable and efficient content delivery services across the internet.

Scaling The Internet

Every day, the web gets bigger. Across the internet, unprecedented volumes of content are created and distributed, with modern-day web infrastructure struggling to keep up with growing demand.

Internet use is surging worldwide, with a reported 24% increase in annual global internet traffic. Live-streamed content has enjoyed a meteoric surge in popularity and now accounts for 17% of global internet traffic, having witnessed a fifteen-fold increase over the past five years.

Providing a much-needed solution to stagnating web infrastructure, the Blockcast CDN leverages the Solana blockchain to aggregate network capacity from tens of thousands of worldwide nodes. This approach enables high-bandwidth content delivery at scale, delivering higher-quality content, such as 4K video, with minimized data consumption and latency.

Beyond scaling the internet, Blackcast’s approach to content delivery also mitigates ISP (internet service provider) network congestion and reduces delivery costs for content owners.

Drawing from his vast experience in mobile network operation, Blockcast CEO Omar Ramadan is well-placed to understand the needs and demands of this rapidly expanding sector. Reflecting on the relationship between mobile networks and blockchain technology, Ramadan recognizes how Solana can help scale Blockcast to new heights.

“In my early career, I built a mobile network core called Magma, enabling anyone worldwide to operate a 4G/5G network for their community. Following our acquisition by Facebook, we successfully deployed to 500 sites over five years. When Helium adopted Magma and integrated it with token incentives, it managed to deploy to 17,000 sites in just one year. This experience led me to recognize a similar opportunity within content delivery networks (CDNs), a critical piece of traffic scaling infrastructure inaccessible to community networks. 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.” - Omar Ramadan, Blockcast CEO

By empowering internet traffic servers to deploy blockchain-powered nodes at scale, Blockcast is laying the foundation for a more sustainable and efficient World Wide Web.

Lattice Fund Leads Blockcast Seed Round

Blockcast’s $2.85M raise was led by Lattice Fund and included participation from notable funds, including Protocol Labs, Finality Capital Partners, AllianceDAO, Zee Prime Capital, and RW3 Ventures. 

As leaders of the round, Lattice Fund expressed enthusiasm towards Blockcast’s vision. 

“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

With early funding taken care of, Blockcast now turns its attention to the development of its platform and the rapid deployment of its global infrastructure network. In a bid to involve network participants as early as possible, Blockcast has launched a pre-order campaign for its home RELAY nodes, which promises to improve stream quality and provide weekly rewards.

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