Key points summary - Why is DAWN worth paying attention to?
In the past two years, a total of $33 million was raised, which is higher than Grass; both rounds were led by Dragonfly.
Solona's official website published an article, clearly promoting DAWN.
The business is backed by its own physical operations - decentralized internet services + tradable network services, self-developed hardware, with hanging users participating as validator nodes, resulting in a closed-loop business revenue source.
Detailed introduction to the DAWN project
Introduction
DAWN is a decentralized wireless network for providing internet services, developed by the Andrena team, allowing owners or residents to purchase and sell internet capacity in their surrounding areas - enabling users to operate as their own internet service providers.
Problem solving
Breaking the monopoly of traditional centralized Internet Service Providers (ISPs)
52% of Americans have only one option for high-speed internet service. In some cases, for the same internet service, the fees paid by some users, depending on geographic location, infrastructure costs, population density, and other factors, could be up to 100 times more than those paid by other users.
Solution
DAWN is a decentralized network protocol built on Solana, aimed at guiding and orchestrating user-driven multi-gigabit mesh networks to provide users with fast, convenient, and affordable wireless internet.
Through protocols and hardware, owners or residents have the opportunity to buy and sell internet bandwidth in their surrounding areas, allowing users to operate as their own Internet Service Providers. This will create a user-driven wireless network providing affordable internet to homes and businesses at multi-gigabit speeds.
Business logic: Node parties can build wireless networks by purchasing DAWN hardware antennas, providing opportunities for users to trade network bandwidth among themselves; finally, this is verified and processed by validators and the Solana network, forming a complete closed-loop network system.
Funding situation
The DAWN project has achieved significant funding success in the past two years, raising a total of $33 million, a figure that even surpasses the Grass project. Notably, both rounds of funding for DAWN were led by the well-known investment institution Dragonfly Capital.
DAWN successfully completed $15 million in Series A funding in February 2023, followed by another $18 million in funding in August 2024.
Physical business situation
From the DAWN project white paper, we can see that it is not a purely software-based project. Intuitively, contributing bandwidth requires installing some plugin or downloading software to 'hang on', but DAWN also requires hardware coordination.
Hardware part
The hardware part of DAWN consists of RAS and CNHR, aimed at enhancing network coverage and stability while simplifying user experience and laying the foundation for future cloud applications.
RAS is a point-to-multipoint radio antenna combination, and DAWN calls this hardware-software combination system a Robot-Antenna System (RAS).
RAS can automatically execute wireless configuration and radio adjustments, allowing deployment without requiring users to have any technical expertise, making it lower in entry barriers.
Dynamic antennas allow the network to continuously adjust its positioning to find the optimal data transmission path.
On the terminal, users access the DWAN network using the x86 architecture cloud-native home router (Cloud Native Home Router, CNHR) provided by the team. This router uses two groundbreaking technologies:
DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit): Enhances network performance by allowing the processor direct access to the NIC (Network Interface Card), facilitating efficient packet processing for user-space applications, managed by the Linux Foundation.
VPP (Vector Packet Processing): Significantly enhances router performance by leveraging DPDK to concentrate batch processing and handling of packets, developed by Cisco.
Software part
DAWN has designed a system called Witness Chain for validation, and the current way to become a validator is to download a browser plugin, register an account, and then maintain a connection.
Users earn rewards by maintaining connections, recommending others to participate, and participating as validators (validators are randomly selected).
Solana is responsible for receiving and providing feedback from the VN and protocol's Proof and Service contracts.
The white paper also indicates that this business has started in areas such as New York, USA, and is expected to cover over 3 million households in the US, with plans to expand globally to Asia, Europe, and Latin America.
DAWN multi-mining tutorial
The current platform has launched the DAWN project, supporting users to mine with multiple machines. While mining DAWN, users can also run Aleo, Grass, and Nodepay projects simultaneously for unified management.
The specific operation tutorial is as follows👇:
Access the DePIN360 official website via your browser: https://www.depin360.ai/pc
Download the DePIN360 software and install it on your PC, bind the device according to the verification code prompt.
Set up DAWN, Nodepay, and Grass accounts in the client and run the projects
New users registering for DAWN, Nodepay, and Grass accounts in mainland China need a VPN.
