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Until now, when building on Solana, there were only two bad choices to store and deliver the data in the app.
You can lean against Web2 giants like CloudFlare or AWS. CloudFlare and AWS are fast and easy, but very concentrated, and are outside the cryptography spirit. Alternatively, you can use IPF, Arweave, and various other gateways to stitch together more distributed modifications. These latter methods work, but you'll need lots of duct tape and set-top soccer to dial in.
The decentralized CDN pipe network is intended to change everything with Firestarter Storage, an infrastructure play designed to convert pipes into a full stack CloudFlare alternative in the Solana ecosystem.
Previously, Pipe has been operating behind the scenes, running Solana's full proof archives and Snapshots via Firestarter Infrastructure.
Currently, Firestarter Storage combines pipe alumni with distributed transport to full stack cloud competitors, Origin Storage, CDN Delivery, Edge Compute int cloudflare class systems, but decentralized from scratch.
Developers can leverage the same backbone to deliver everything from pay-as-scrolling videos to edge-optimized AI workloads.
“Storage from day one has been a key component of the pipe network's services as a distributed CDN running a global network of over 280,000 point-point (POP) node operators,” says David Rhodus, founder of Permissless Labs.
“This is not possible without Origin support, which already holds the complete Solana dataset (one page containing 350 million files), reducing sync times by up to 30% through Solana Snapshots.”
Unlike Legacy CDNS, Firestarter provides content directly from Pipe's native storage layer. This means you will not leave the pipe network.
Content is entirely present within a distributed system, with prices bundled at the protocol level. This is a $1 pipe token for every gigabyte in the base layer.
For developers, this represents a whole new architectural feature. It's a pop-level computing for byte-byte streaming micropayments, geopin smart contracts with hard data sovereignty guarantees, and edge inference and ultra-low latency gaming.
“Pipe's unified fabric allows Devs to launch the PayCrall Video and Query Dataset API, instead of pre-purchase a bucket of bandwidth,” Lhodus told Lightspeed.
