Huddle01, Blockchain Video Conferencing Project That Seeks to Outdo Zoom, Targets $37M Node Sale

Huddle01, a blockchain project to provide decentralized audio and video conferencing – aiming to provide lower latency virtual meetings than Zoom and Google Meet – plans to raise as much as $37 million in a sale of network nodes.

The 49,600 “media nodes” being sold offer operators a way to contribute excess internet bandwidth the communication network, in exchange for token rewards. According to a litepaper, some 21% of the project’s HUDL tokens will be distributed to media nodes. Huddle01 is built using technology borrowed from the Ethereum layer-2 network Arbitrum.

The first sale of up 20,000 nodes, which would cost a total of $8 million, is set to begin in early November, with a whitelist sale starting on Nov. 6 and a public sale on Nov. 8, according to a press release shared exclusively with CoinDesk. If those are sold out, subsequent nodes could be sold to reach as much as $37 million.

A test network will launch two weeks after the sale completes, according to the press release.

“These nodes will power a network that already outperforms the incumbent Web2 competitors on latency where there is a large cluster of nodes, and is capable of improving lags across the globe,” Huddle01 CEO Ayush Ranjan said in the release.

Huddle01 becomes the latest in a growing trend of blockchain projects conducting node sales as a way to raise funds while simultaneously decentralizing their networks. Earlier this year, Aethir, a decentralized GPU cloud infrastructure provider, raised about $126 million in ether (ETH) by distributing node licenses, and since then projects including Sophon, CARV, XAI Games, Powerloom and more recently Sonic SVM have pursued the method to bring in fresh funds.

Huddle01, which previously had raised about $6 million in traditional fundraisings from investors including Hivemind, Balaji Srinivasan, Stani Kulechov, Dan Romero and Juan Benet, describes itself in the litepaper as “a fully decentralized, self-sovereign, borderless and open network that will provide the necessary framework for performant, cost-effective and censorship-resistant real-time connectivity.”

The project’s “dRTC Chain” is a new Ethereum-compatible blockchain network built using technology from the layer-2 project Arbitrum’s Orbit software stack.

Purported benefits of the decentralized setup include avoidance of the “oligarchic practices” of “large corporations that exert unilateral price and supply dominance,” as well as reduced costs and latency resulting from the “geographic disparity of data centers.”

According to the team, Huddle01 boasts a latency of 13 milliseconds in New York City, compared to Google Meet’s 141 milliseconds, and Zoom’s 20 milliseconds.

One feature of the project is “token gated rooms,” where only holders of specific fungible tokens or NFTs on Ethereum or Solana can join a virtual meeting space.