A few years ago, Neil Chatterjee was invited to a hardware competition with the goal of building a data-sharing application to enable someone with a bad Verizon connection to share spare bandwidth on a T-Mobile account. If it worked, the T-Mobile account holder would be paid with crypto. 

While the initiative never hit the market, it inspired an idea in Chatterjee: to build a fixed data-sharing application for the home where households hold the power, not big tech. 

This was in 2017, around the time wireless Internet was getting good, but prices were exorbitant. Chatterjee built a wireless network at Princeton University, where he previously studied engineering, and branched out into surrounding areas. Teaming up with people who had excess bandwidth and good real estate, like a university, enabled Chatterjee to create a lot of wireless coverage. 

“We ended up building Andrena out of taking that model of using wireless to distribute Internet across an area, then built a premium product inside the building, so that we could offer a more convenient Internet experience,” Chatterjee said. 

He has since brought Andrena to large-scale residential buildings and works with various government bodies such as the New York City Housing Authority. 

“If you take this technology and create a layer by which anybody in the world can help grow networks with us, now you could achieve a much bigger vision,” he said. 

That breakthrough led to DAWN, Andrena’s decentralized physical infrastructure network, or DePIN, protocol. It allows individual homes to become infrastructure participants without relying on centralized telecommunication and cloud companies. 

Andrena will be rolling out DAWN as part of its existing network, as well as with other Internet service providers, such as Flume Internet in New York City. Last month, Andrena announced $18 million in funding, backed by top crypto VC firms, Dragonfly and Nic Carter’s Castle Island Ventures. 

“Our goal is to do to the Internet what solar panels did to electricity,” Chatterjee said. “The same way that consumers can own their infrastructure, get access to a cheaper resource, and sell their surplus back to the grid.” 

From Andrena’s web site

David Kroger, senior vice president at StoneX Group, an institutional financial services network, said it appears the DAWN technology is aligned with trends he’s seeing in DePIN growth, and is finding market fit. 

He drew from the example of Helium, a decentralized wireless network, which grew from 11 hotspots to 18,000 in just one year. Today, they have over 112,000 users on their mobile plan, showing the potential for rapid adoption in this space. 

“One key factor that could strongly influence DAWN’s adoption and capital allocation is the blockchain they choose to deploy on,” Kroger said. “The whitepaper mentions testnets on Caldera and Arbitrum Nitro, and future development on Solana, which has seen DePIN projects valued higher by investors. Given that DePIN projects have been one of the better-performing sectors this year, the choice of chain could significantly impact their growth trajectory and investor interest.” 

Chatterjee said the technology to make this possible has only become available in the past year or so. 

“Wireless doesn’t have infinite range. It’s proximity based. This means people need to collaborate to form these large-scale networks and collaboration needs a trustless layer, which is where crypto comes in,” he said. 

Chatterjee argues the entire world needs DePIN, not just the developing world, because it shifts the equity value that’s now controlled by centralized entities like Spectrum to individual households. 

“Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook control all the cloud infrastructure. Comcast, Horizon and Spectrum control all the telecom infrastructure,” he said. “DePIN is an opportunity for a household to become an active owner and contributor in the entire digital infrastructure ecosystem.”

Read more: How Huddle is Democratizing Digital Connectivity in the Developing World – a Critical Use Case for DePIN

Currently 52 percent of Americans only have one high-speed Internet option available, Chatterjee added. DAWN will use wireless to cost-effectively propagate it from sources where the Internet is either in surplus or very cheap – essentially bringing wholesale Internet pricing to the retail market. 

“If you have a bad connection from Comcast, your only recourse is to do a speed test, pick up the phone, complain and hope they give you a refund. In this scenario, if you’re buying from somebody in your neighborhood, because of the trustless coordination layer, nobody can argue about the speed that you’re getting,” Chatterjee said. 

“You can have a programmable Service Level Agreement (SLA) where if you’re paying for more than what you’re getting, there’s an automatic refund through the protocol. If you buy a gigabit from someone, but you only get 500 megabits per second, instead of paying $30, maybe you’ll get a $10 discount. Smart contracts facilitate the entire exchange between the underlying purchasing of service from somebody in the network or the automatic refund that needs to happen in the event that you’re not getting the service promised.” 

StoneX’s Kroger said that while cheaper Internet and profit potential for node operators are clear benefits, the $1,000 hardware setup cost per home and adoption rate uncertainty remain limitations. 

“DAWN's model is likened to rooftop solar panel installations. Currently, only about 10 percent of homes have solar panels, so a similar or lower adoption rate might apply to DAWN's Robotic Antenna System,” he said. 

U.S. telecom regulations may also present hurdles for DAWN, particularly in states where Open Access Networks aren’t fully supported, Kroger concluded. 

Bringing households on-chain 

To reach the masses, Chatterjee argues that you want something where the only upside isn’t just crypto. “You either want to have a better experience or you want to make some non-speculative money as a result,” he said. 

Projects that bring web3 to the masses need to be relatable, and what’s more relatable than an Internet connection. It’s something almost every single person has, or needs. 

“Cheap Internet is the Trojan horse to get this box into people’s households. Not only does it provide Internet connectivity to you and your neighbors, but it can also be used for decentralized storage, decentralized GPUs and compute,” Chatterjee said. 

The goal is to connect households to the broader economy, where they own the underlying infrastructure to power the digital world, no matter the location.