Pipe Network cuts Solana sync time by 30% for some validators

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Pipe Network, a decentralized infrastructure project from Permissionless Labs, is publicly spotlighting its verifiable access to Solana snapshots through its decentralized CDN in a new case study. According to internal performance benchmarks provided to Lightspeed, usage points to 30% faster node initialization and far lower infrastructure costs.

Pipe also reports handling approximately 100 TB of snapshot traffic daily, 700 TB weekly, and around 3 PB per month. For context, Solana node operators collectively share an estimated 7–14 PB of snapshot data monthly to help validators and RPC nodes bootstrap. So, the contribution from Pipe is a weighty share of the network’s overall bandwidth burden.

It’s an interesting early look at the returns from a techy new DePIN startup on Solana. Pipe disclosed a $10 million funding round led by Multicoin Capital in the fall.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are distributed systems of servers that deliver mass volumes of content quickly and reliably by caching data closer to where it’s needed. 

In Pipe’s case, it acts as a high-speed delivery network specifically for snapshots of Solana’s ledger, which basically show the state of all the network’s accounts at a given point in time. Validators use these snapshots to restore state quickly after outages, updates or desynchronization events, enabling nodes to catch up with the network and rejoin consensus without full reprocessing.

Solana needs this, because the size and frequency of snapshot downloads have far outpaced the capacity of traditional community-run endpoints. Pipe’s CDN maintains uptime more effectively by making sure that validators can draw down critical data without waiting on slow or overloaded sources.

Solana snapshots tend to be massive. We’re talking an order of magnitude in the hundreds of gigabytes. The kind of scale you’d expect from full-resolution 4K video libraries or major enterprise backups, except it’s happening regularly on a live network. 

And yet, in the past, users usually downloaded this data from a modest set of validator-hosted endpoints or community-run servers. As the network’s ledger continues to grow, those download speeds have slowed, and availability has become patchy. There just aren’t enough reliable, high-bandwidth sources from which to get these snapshots. That scarcity leads to validators stuck in sync purgatory, which degrades 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 their validator or RPC setup. Snapshots come in full and incremental formats. Fetching the latest snapshot can be automated, and setup, they say, is minimal.

Pipe also bakes in ways to verify network data in addition to hosting it. “We verify data integrity using Merkle tree proofs,” Pipe Network core contributor David Rhodus told Lightspeed. “When a node serves data, clients can request a Merkle proof to confirm it matches the expected Merkle root. We also run random Merkle proof audits, as well as spot checks to ensure nodes actually have the cached data they’re reporting.”

For node operators, the best part might be the price: There isn’t one.

“This is currently being offered as a public good funded by the Pipe Foundation for the betterment of the Solana node operator experience,” Rhodus said.

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