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About DAWN
DAWN is a decentralized broadband network on Solana that extends the fixed-wireless footprint of Andrena, a New York internet provider, into a market for shared capacity. Households and small operators join through a browser extension or the Black Box hardware node, and the protocol pays for measured delivery rather than advertised speed: proof of backhaul measures real throughput, while proof of location and proof of frequency verify where a node sits and which spectrum it uses, so a node claiming 1 Gbps but delivering 400 Mbps is settled at the true figure. Users buy connectivity on demand, and Solana records who supplied how much bandwidth.
The network runs in three layers: rooftop antennas and home nodes provide access, the Black Box handles backhaul measurement and spectrum verification, and Solana records supply and settlement. Nodes are paid on measured throughput, with backhaul proofs sampled every few minutes and location and frequency proofs tied to a base station and channel. Users buy connectivity on demand and are billed on usage, and operators can attach their own customers through the same interface. In September 2026 the USD.infra vault opened, channelling stablecoin capital into contracted connectivity deployments.
DAWN completed a $2.5 million funding round with participation from VanEck Ventures and others.
It then completed a $13 million Series B round led by Polychain.
Tools for Humanity acquired Dawn Wallet.
On September 22, 2026 DAWN's USD.infra Vault went live, with M0 providing stablecoin infrastructure, Loopscale the vault rails, Chainlink the data and Turtle distribution, while Orca, Exponent, Kamino and Allez Labs extended secondary use. In September it deployed $630,000 across three infrastructure projects covering 1,053 contracted units in Florida and New Jersey, with four deployments yielding 16-18% and a 276-unit Florida property funded with $200,000.
On February 25 DAWN announced a partnership with Flume to expand wireless coverage, and on January 15 published a first-quarter roadmap shifting from building infrastructure to activation. It has raised $48.5 million from investors including Polychain, Dragonfly, ParaFi, Robot Ventures, CMT Digital and Wintermute, and rewards nodes through Proof of Bandwidth metering.
Future strategy and roadmap: DAWN will extend the USD.infra Vault launched on September 22 2026 from broadband yield into AI compute, data delivery and edge capacity, building secondary use cases with partners M0, Loopscale, Chainlink, Turtle, Orca, Exponent, Kamino, Allez and Titan; using Season rewards and real broadband revenue such as Andrena's coverage of ten-plus thousand households, it will gradually replace emission driven incentives with revenue backed ones, turn the real revenue of decentralized broadband into investable cash flows, and keep expanding U.S. household coverage via operators like Andrena.
DAWN grew out of the wireless broadband operator Andrena, and its three co-founders all trace back to Princeton: Neil Chatterjee as CEO, James Smits owning the user-facing and ecosystem direction, and Nick De Veaux as CTO. Chatterjee studied electrical engineering at Princeton before dropping out in his third year, having also taken courses at NJIT and Montclair State, and was vice president of engineering at the dental cloud platform Dentboard. Smits holds a Princeton degree in economics and environmental studies, started in business development at Banyan Water and later became a venture partner at two early funds. De Veaux earned a Princeton BSE, mentored at Andela and worked as a data scientist at the Simons Foundation, and now leads DAWN's onchain protocol and hardware. The core has academic and infrastructure backgrounds.