Investing in Blockcast

The crypto industry has long been obsessed with blockchain scalability, but today we’re focusing on something much bigger: scaling the entire internet. We’re excited to announce that we are leading a $2.85M investment round into Blockcast, a community-driven content delivery network (CDN) that is tackling the massive bandwidth challenge facing the internet today.

To understand the problem, we need to revisit the origins of internet traffic. In the early days of the internet in the 80s and 90s, Unicast was adopted for content delivery, where data packets are sent one-to-one between a server and client. This made sense when internet traffic was light and content was mostly text. The first video in the 90s was delivered over a Multicast Backbone that sent packets to groups of people simultaneously much like a TV channel that many people can tune into.  This early internet broadcasting had challenges with tracking, and ISPs were not able to bill or incentivized to keep it running. As video streaming platforms like YouTube and Netflix grew, unicast became the default for delivering bandwidth-heavy content. The problem? Each user requires a separate data stream, causing bandwidth consumption to scale linearly with the number of users. Today, video streaming accounts for more than 70% of global data usage, with live streaming alone making up 17%. Let alone the capacity shortages in the rest of the world, there isn’t enough capacity for major events to be live streamed at 4K in the US. With internet traffic growing at 24% annually and higher-fidelity formats like 8K, and VR/XR emerging, even the giants of the web are struggling to keep up. 

This is where Blockcast comes in. Blockcast combines traditional broadcasting technology with content delivery network technology to deliver high-bandwidth streaming and  popular downloads efficiently using multicast rather than unicast. This allows content owners to broadcast to large audiences at a fraction of the cost by tapping into the underutilized and fragmented TV, Satellite, and 5G Broadcast spectrum. As more people shift to internet streaming, Blockcast creates a market for this unused bandwidth and uses a community-driven model to deploy multicast CDN relay nodes for efficient direct-to-user multicast and caching for hyperlocal unicast delivery.

Blockcast is led by Omar Ramadan, a pioneer in decentralized wireless networks. Previously, Omar helped build Magma, a mobile network core acquired by Facebook and later adopted by Helium. Magma enables anyone to operate a 4G/5G network in their community. After spending years deploying such networks over satellite, experiencing the exclusivity of CDNInspired by the success of Heliums, and the security and scalability limitations of others, he founded Blockcast to decentralize content delivery on a global scale using token incentives. 

Blockcast is going to scale the internet and we are proud to back them. 

To learn more or explore partnership opportunities, visit https://www.blockcast.network