Andrena, a Solana-based decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) project and wireless internet provider has secured $18 million in a Series A extension round led by Dragonfly, with participation from CMT Digital, Castle Island Ventures, and Wintermute Ventures.
The investment round for DAWN was structured as a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) with token warrants, bringing Andrena’s total funding to $38 million. This round follows a $15 million Series A round announced in February 2023, in which Dragonfly was also the lead investor.
Democratizing Internet Access
Since its inception in 2017, Andrena has provided wireless internet services at reduced costs (currently starting from $30 per month) to customers across the United States using rooftop equipment. The new funding will be used to accelerate the development and deployment of Andrena’s decentralized autonomous wireless network (DAWN) protocol.
DePINs are peer-to-peer (P2P) crowd networks where individuals share physical infrastructure resources like energy, data storage, computer power, or bandwidth. For example, in energy, DePINs facilitate P2P trading of renewable energy, empowering individuals to become both producers and consumers. In the same way, DePINs can also democratize internet access, building a network to crowdsource bandwidth and incentivizing people to deploy routers and provide internet services.
DAWN is a DePIN Solana-native protocol designed by Andrena to offer decentralized internet services. Unlike traditional internet service providers, DAWN enables users to become proactive network participants that can buy, sell and share internet bandwidth directly with each other without having to rely on centralized providers.
“We’re thrilled to be building the first DePIN protocol to offer decentralized broadband with multi-gigabit wireless technology on Solana,” said the company’s August 7 post on X.
“Our vision is to transform the internet from a provider-owned model to a consumer-owned model. The same way homes can own their own electricity generation with solar panels and sell their excess back to the grid, DAWN aims to do the same with the internet.”
DAWN uses a “proof of backhaul” mechanism to verify and quantify the throughput capabilities of each participating node. The algorithm for this mechanism was developed in Andreana’s collaboration with Pramod Viswanath, a key contributor to the open source AI platform Sentient and a professor at Princeton University, and Polygon (MATIC) co-founder Sandeep Nailwal.
DAWN is currently operating in a testnet environment ahead of launching on Solana (SOL).
DePIN Market Explodes
The DePIN sector is experiencing rapid growth. Fundraising volume has increased 296% year over year, reflecting a significant influx of capital into the industry. This investment has fueled a 400% increase in total market capitalization to $20 billion, according to Messari, a market research firm.
Solana with its high transaction speed and low fees is currently leading the adoption of blockchains for DePIN projects, hosting around 78 such initiatives.
While Solana currently holds the top spot, other Layer 1 blockchains such as IoTeX and Peaq are actively expanding their ecosystems for DePINs.
