Sale of as much as $8 million of nodes to whitelisted buyers would begin on Nov. 6.
Additional node sales after that could increase total raised to $37 million.
Huddle01's "dRTC Chain" is built using the Ethereum layer-2 project Arbitrum's Orbit software stack, with a test network scheduled to launch two weeks after the node sale concludes.

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.

Built on Arbitrum Orbit

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.

Schematic illustrating Huddle01's "dRTC" network (Huddle01)

node sales Arbitrum Fundraising Zoom Video Conferencing

Bradley Keoun

Bradley Keoun is CoinDesk's managing editor of tech & protocols, where he oversees a team of reporters covering blockchain technology, and previously ran the global crypto markets team. A two-time Loeb Awards finalist, he previously was chief global finance and economic correspondent for TheStreet and before that worked as an editor and reporter for Bloomberg News in New York and Mexico City, reporting on Wall Street, emerging markets and the energy industry. He started out as a police-beat reporter for the Gainesville Sun in Florida and later worked as a general-assignment reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Originally from Fort Wayne, Indiana, he double-majored in electrical engineering and classical studies as an undergraduate at Duke University and later obtained a master's in journalism from the University of Florida. He is currently based in Austin, Texas, and in his spare time plays guitar, sings in a choir and hikes in the Texas Hill Country. He owns less than $1,000 each of several cryptocurrencies.