Pipe Network, the decentralized infrastructure project from Permissionless Labs, is in the limelight for its verifiable access to Solana snapshots through its decentralized Content Delivery Network (CDN), according to a recent case study. The internal performance benchmarks provided to Lightspeed indicate a 30% faster node initialization and significantly lower infrastructure costs, thanks to Pipe’s technology.
To understand the sheer volume of data handled by Pipe, consider this – the network reportedly manages about 100 TB of snapshot traffic daily, approximately 700 TB weekly, and close to 3 PB every month. In comparison, Solana node operators collectively share between 7–14 PB of snapshot data monthly to aid validators and RPC nodes bootstrap. This makes Pipe’s contribution quite substantial in terms of the network’s overall bandwidth load.
This case study gives a fascinating early indication of the potential returns from this enterprising DePIN startup on Solana. Notably, Pipe had announced a $10 million funding round led by Multicoin Capital last fall.
For the uninitiated, CDNs are distributed server systems that deliver large volumes of content swiftly and reliably by caching data closer to the end-users. In Pipe’s context, it operates as a high-speed delivery network specifically for Solana’s ledger snapshots, providing an up-to-date state of all the network’s accounts at any given time. These snapshots allow validators to restore the state quickly after any outage, update, or desynchronization event, enabling nodes to catch up with the network and rejoin consensus without the need for complete reprocessing.
Solana urgently needs such a service, given that the size and frequency of snapshot downloads have significantly outstripped the capacity of traditional community-run endpoints. Pipe’s CDN ensures more effective uptime by allowing validators to access essential data without relying on slow or overburdened sources.
It’s worth noting that Solana snapshots are typically enormous, often in the order of hundreds of gigabytes. This is comparable to the scale of full-resolution 4K video libraries or significant enterprise backups, except that it’s happening regularly on a live network.
Historically, users have downloaded this data from a small set of validator-hosted endpoints or community-run servers. However, as the network’s ledger continues to expand, download speeds have slowed, and availability has become patchy due to a shortage of reliable, high-bandwidth sources for these snapshots. This has led to validators being trapped in synchronization limbo, negatively impacting performance for all.
To address this issue, Pipe Network hosts Solana snapshots on a high-availability CDN designed for bandwidth-intensive applications. Operators can access snapshots via Pipe’s Web UI or JSON API and directly integrate them into their validator or RPC setup. The snapshots are available in full and incremental formats. The process of fetching the latest snapshot can be automated, and the setup, according to Pipe, requires minimal effort.
