Announcing PipeQuest

TL;DR on PipeQuest

• What: PipeQuest is a 3-season incentive sprint driving Pipe Network hardening before mainnet.

• When: Season 1 opens May 5th, 2025; each season runs ~7 days.

• Why: Stress-test 200k PoPs, surface real-world perf data, and bootstrap demand.

IBRL = “Increase Bandwidth, Reduce Latency.” It’s become the informal rally-cry for scaling Solana’s core protocol and every product that sits on top of it. While there are many ways to IBRL, our experience building the Amazon Elemental Cloud’s content delivery network (CDN)—which onboarded service providers like Netflix, Comcast, ABC, and NBC—enables us to take those learnings and apply them to a better, distributed CDN on Solana.

Pipe Network leverages hyperlocalized nodes to deliver content quickly and securely on a massive scale by increasing bandwidth and reducing latency. Core to Pipe Network’s innovation is its fleet of decentralized Point of Presence (“PoP”) nodes that anyone—from internet service providers (ISPs) to enterprise and web3 companies—can deploy as close as ~50 miles from end users. This proximity allows Pipe Network to reduce latency to as low as sub-10ms and optimize TCP performance and bandwidth utilization. Pipe Network’s permissionless model and Linux-based software can turn virtually any device into a PoP node allowing operators to deploy nodes and scale without restrictive contracts or unfair pricing—eliminating entry barriers in the traditional ISP partnership and PoP deployment model. 

Pipe Network disrupts traditional CDN payment structures by treating node operators as partners who have ownership within Pipe Network’s ecosystem. The higher the demand for data in any region, the more rewards participants can earn. This scarcity-based model ensures that PoP operators will build where customers truly need content rather than simply following the terms of commercial contracts. The higher the demand for data in any region, the more rewards participants can earn. This scarcity-based model ensures that operators will build where customers truly need content rather than simply following the terms of commercial contracts. 

By pinning Solana ledger and snapshot chunks on the Pipe PoP intra-mesh, a validator can run “stateless”—fetching only the block or account ranges it needs over a micro-paid API call and discarding them after execution. This shifts terabytes of SSD overhead onto the CDN edge, lets lightweight replicas spin up in minutes, and still keeps read latency under ~10 ms thanks to the same IBRL path optimizations.

Since launching its private devnet at the end of January, the Pipe Network has seen:

• 200,000 PoP nodes onboarded 

• More than 200,000 files uploaded 

• More than 250 Terabytes of cumulative storage used

The  PipeQuest testnet is designed to further harden the network and incentivize the onboarding of additional PoP nodes ahead of the mainnet launch later this summer.

The Road to Decentralization

1 · The “Season” Framework

Cadence — one-week sprints with a 48 h scoreboard freeze for audits.
Why tight loops? Feedback arrives while enthusiasm is still hot and code is still fresh.

Season 1 — PoP Node Performance - Metrics and Scoring

score = Σ(weight × z-score(metric))

Season 1 Tiers and Rewards

Season 2 — Community Engagement

Participant contributions are evaluated through a content scoring system.

Regular engagement is rewarded with a consistency bonus.

Mystery-Box Payouts: Rewards are dynamically calculated based on content impact and consistency, with built-in caps to ensure fairness across all contributors..

Season 3 — Onboarding

qualified_usage = TB served × region weight

(Regions with low density get a 1.3–2× weight.)

Rewards scale 1 → 3× Mystery-Box for 1 TB → 10 TB cap, plus 10 % moving average lift in future season weightings—ensuring early adopters keep benefiting.

Mystery Box Economy (High Level)

weekly_MB_pool = 10,000 pts

season_allocation = pool / active_participants

final_reward = season_allocation × user_multiplier

2 · From Testnet → Mainnet (progress-gated)

We ship mainnet only when the testnet checks every box below—no arbitrary dates:

1. Robustness

   • ≥ 95 % fleet uptime over a full Season.

   • p95 delivery latency ≤ 35 ms for top-20 metro areas.

2. Security

   • Formal audit of PoP telemetry and reward contracts.

   • At least two independent bug-bounty payouts closed.

3. Economic soundness

   • Emissions curve + Mystery-Box incentives reviewed.

4. Decentralization metrics

   • ≥ 1 000 unique operator wallets with PoPs in production.

   • No single entity controls > 15 % of aggregate egress.

5. Governance bootstrapped

Hit all five, flip the Mainnet switch.

3 · Why Decentralization Drives the Vision

• Resilience: Eliminates single points of failure for edge traffic.

• Neutrality: Provides censorship resistance for various online content and services.

• Market-driven performance: Fosters competition among nodes based on price and latency.

• Community upside: Rewards operators with PIPE tokens and empowers token-holders in network governance.

In short, a cloud that can’t be rate-limited, quietly repriced, or politically throttled.

Your Role After Mainnet

Governance forum + proposal portal go live immediately post-mainnet.
Expect early votes on:

1. Storage-layer launch parameters

2. Fee-revenue share between PoPs and protocol treasury

3. Roadmap slot for serverless edge-compute preview

5 · End-Game Vision

Pipe aims to become crypto’s pre-eminent cloud service layer:

• Day 0: Blazing-fast CDN.

• Day 1: Decentralized object storage.

• Day N: Edge compute, real-time data, and whatever the community PIPs into existence.

Mainnet is not the finish line—it’s the starting gun.

What Pipe Network CDN Is & Why It Beats Legacy CDNs

Bandwidth at Light-Switch Distance

Pipe Network is a permissionless, hyper-local CDN: instead of a few thousand metro-sized PoPs, we run hundreds of thousands of “micro-PoPs” sitting inside last-mile ISPs, office closets, and even residential fiber loops

Who Should Care

If you care about shaving every last millisecond—or turning your spare Mbps into token flow—Tour de Pipe is where you jump in. Deploy a node, throw real traffic at it, get paid for every cryptographically proven byte, and help us ship an edge that finally acts like one.

1. Why We’re Running This

Pipe Network already moves snapshots 30 % faster for Solana validators than S3/CDN blends. Cool—but we need orders-of-magnitude more telemetry before the mainnet switch-flip. PipeQuestTour de Pipe supplies that data by dangling concrete rewards for three distinct behaviors:

Each metric drives a specific subsystem; failures surface quickly in logs.

2. Testbed Baseline

• Nodes online: 200 ,000

• Unique files stored: 200 k+

• Cumulative storage: 250 TB

• Topology: multi-region Solana RPC adjacency; 1-hop overlay to any PoP ≤ 40 ms 90th pct.

3. Reward Math (High Level)

score = Σ(epoch) [

if uptime_ratio ≥ UPTIME_MIN then

(λ_l * max(0, 1 – min(1, p99_latency / 150 ms))) +

(λ_r * successful_range_probes) +

(λ_e * min(1, egress_GB / target_GB))

else

0 # epoch disqualified

]

Rationale
Uptime isn’t rewarded—it’s mandatory. Dropping below UPTIME_MIN zeroes the epoch, ensuring operators keep nodes online 24/7. The scoring focus is on latency, correctness, and real bandwidth. The min() clamp on the egress term caps advantage from extreme traffic volumes, so whales can’t distort the leaderboard once they hit the “good-citizen” threshold.

4. Detailed Guide to Joining the Testnet

Joining the testnet involves a few straightforward steps to get your node up and running and connected to the network. This section provides a more detailed explanation of each step.

1) Get an invite code — Register for the node and provide your contact information and geographic information where the PoP node will be located.

Airtable link: https://airtable.com/apph9N7T0WlrPqnyc/pagSLmmUFNFbnKVZh/form

2) Install the software as documented online:

https://docs.pipe.network/nodes/testnet

3) Configure Network Ports:

To ensure your node can communicate effectively with the rest of the network, it's crucial to have the necessary network ports open.

• Port 443 (HTTPS): This port must be open to the public internet. It is essential for secure communication and is likely used for various critical network functions. Ensure that your firewall or router is configured to allow inbound TCP traffic on port 443.

• Port 80 (HTTP) and Port 8003 (Optional): Opening port 80 is optional but may be beneficial for certain network functionalities or for providing unencrypted access to some services. Port 8003 is also optional and its specific purpose may vary depending on the testnet configuration. Refer to the testnet documentation for more details on when and why you might need to open these optional ports. Ensure that if you choose to open these ports, your firewall or router is configured accordingly to allow inbound TCP traffic.

By following these steps, you should be able to successfully join the Pipe Network testnet and begin participating in its operations. If you encounter any issues during this process, consult the comprehensive Pipe Network documentation or reach out to the community support channels for assistance.

Road to Mainnet

Following the completion of Season 3 and once the requirements for robustness, security, and economic soundness, decentralization, and governance are achieved during testnet, we will do the following in order to prepare for the planned mainnet launch:

• Freeze the testnet reward function in order to audit the points collected by participants across all three seasons and ensure related awards are distributed accordingly

• Ensure key community contributors are made partners in the Pipe Network by migrating the rewards earned by the top-quartile operators into genesis stake allocations.

• Prepare and execute a chaotic-network failover drill replicating a multi-region fault injection to ensure the network is prepared for any emergency scenarios

While the timing of mainnet launch is subject to change based on the satisfaction of the related testnet requirements, the goal is to launch the Pipe Network Mainnet before the end of the summer alongside several key applications, like file storage and video streaming, that are enabled by the Pipe Network’s decentralized CDN. 

About Pipe Foundation

The Pipe Foundation is a non-profit stewarding the Pipe Network protocol and its open-source reference stack. Contact → foundation@pipe.netework