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PipeLess Labs’ distributed infrastructure project, Pipe Network, is a new case study that is published in verifiable access to Solana Snapshots through its distributed CDN. According to the internal performance benchmarks provided to LightSpeed, usage indicates that node initialization is 30% higher and infrastructure costs are much lower.
The pipe also reports about 100 TB of snapshot traffic daily, 700 TB of weekly, and about 3 pb of processing per month. In context, the Solana node operator shares an estimated 7-14 PB of snapshot data each month to assist with validators and RPC node bootstrap. Therefore, contributions from the pipes are a heavy share of the overall bandwidth burden of the network.
Here’s an interesting early look at Solana’s technical new Depin startups. Pipe disclosed a $10 million funding round led by Multicoin Capital in the fall.
For those who don’t know, a content delivery network (CDN) is a distributed server system that quickly and reliably delivers large amounts of content by caching data close to where it is needed.
For Pipe, it acts as a particularly fast delivery network for Solana ledger snapshots. This basically shows the state of accounts on all networks at a given time. Validators use these snapshots to quickly recover state after a halt, update, or asynchronous event, allowing nodes to catch up with the network and rejoin the consensus without full reprocessing.
Solana needs this. This is because the size and frequency of snapshot downloads far outweigh the capabilities of traditional community-run endpoints. Pipe’s CDNs maintain uptime more effectively by allowing the barter to pull down critical data without waiting for a slow, overloaded source.
Solana Snapshots have a huge trend. We talk in hundreds of gigabytes and a few orders of magnitude. The type of scale you would expect from a full-resolution 4K video library or major enterprise backup, except that it is regularly done on live networks.
Yet in the past, users have typically downloaded this data from a conservative validator host endpoint or a set of servers run by a community. As the network ledger continued to grow, these download speeds slowed and availability became patchy. There is no reliable high-bandwidth source sufficient to take these snapshots. Its rarity leads to the verification device being stuck in synchronization. This reduces performance for everyone.
Pipe Network’s solution was to host Solana Snapshots on a high availability CDN designed for bandwidth-intensive applications. Operators can grab snapshots via Pipe’s web UI or JSON API and integrate them directly into validators or RPC setups. Snapshots come in full and incremental format. It says that taking the latest snapshots can be automated and the setup is minimal.
