Preparing the Internet for Artemis

Preparing the Internet for Artemis – Blockcast CDN brings multicast streaming to DAWN

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TLDR:

• Blockcast × DAWN Partnership: Blockcast’s Content Delivery Network with its native multicast streaming protocol is being integrated directly into DAWN’s Black Box, enabling massive global-scale livestreaming events over decentralized wireless networks.
  
  
• Problem: Modern internet infrastructure relies on unicast streaming, inefficiently sending the same data streams to every viewer, causing catastrophic congestion during large huge livestream events.
  
  
• Blockcast’s Unique Value: True multicast technology—sending a single data stream simultaneously to unlimited viewers—through a CDN layer with specialized technology, reducing bandwidth usage by up to 90%, providing seamless 4K and 8K streaming at unprecedented scale.

‍The people are building a new Internet—one household, and one Black Box at a time. As a decentralized Internet moves from possibility to inevitability, certain core technologies and protocols emerge as essential foundations of this landscape. In this series, we explore these history-defining protocols, highlighting their unique roles in enabling a consumer-owned digital, why each is indispensable, and how the Black Box is designed specifically to bring their benefits directly to households.

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On July 20, 1969, more than 600 million people around the world gathered around their televisions, holding their breath as Neil Armstrong took humanity’s first steps on the Moon. It was the largest television audience in history, still true over 50 years later, unified by a single extraordinary moment. Fast forward to today, and NASA’s Artemis mission promises to return humans to the Moon—this time in vivid 4K and 8K ultra-HD livestream quality, accessible not just to millions, but potentially billions of viewers simultaneously online. Artemis is set to become the newest most watched event in human history.

But there’s a major hurdle: our existing internet infrastructure simply isn't prepared to handle the massive bandwidth demands of such an unprecedented global livestream. When you, your parents, or even their parents watched the Apollo 11 Moon landing, it was through traditional broadcast television—an infrastructure inherently designed to scale to millions of simultaneous viewers effortlessly. Broadcast technology sent one signal that everyone could simultaneously receive, enabling unprecedented global events at scale.

The modern internet, however, evolved differently. Designed initially for targeted, individualized information retrieval, our digital networks weren’t built with mass simultaneous streaming in mind. Instead of effortlessly scaling through broadcast, each viewer now requires their own dedicated data stream, an inherently inefficient system for large-scale events. Suddenly, with Artemis and events of similar magnitude on the horizon, the old concept of broadcast is regaining increased relevance in our digital infrastructure. Enter multicast—and Blockcast, the decentralized protocol ensuring networks like DAWN, and those all around the world, are ready to meet tomorrow’s streaming demands.

Unicast vs Multicast: The Streaming Problem Explained

Today, virtually all internet video streaming relies on unicast technology. Under unicast, every viewer initiates their own individual stream to the server containing the content, resulting in millions of identical data streams flooding network infrastructure simultaneously. The result is significant network congestion as the same information gets retransmitted over and over again to each viewer. Remember Paul v. Tyson buffering on Netflix? Fortunately, there’s a better way.

Multicast offers an almost obvious alternative. Instead of sending separate streams to each individual viewer, multicast transmits a single data stream that intelligently branches out within a network, delivering identical content to many viewers simultaneously. This dramatically reduces bandwidth usage—often by over 90%—enabling crisp, uninterrupted 4K or even 8K livestreaming experiences at global scale without overwhelming the network.

Blockcast: Unlocking Multicast’s Potential

Interestingly, multicast capability already exists within most modern internet hardware and infrastructure, but it remains largely underused. Why? Because traditional CDN and ISP structures lack aligned incentives and coordination mechanisms needed to deploy multicast nodes at scale. Blockcast solves precisely this alignment issue through crypto  incentives to (1) aggregating decentralized CDN capacity across ISPs, internet exchanges, and data centers, while pairing it with (2) a multicast enabled last-mile stack.

This creates a permissionless marketplace for wholesale CDN pricing (previously available only to media giants) and makes multicast-enabled CDN infrastructure accessible to content creators of every scale. The result is infinite composability between decentralized ISPs and CDNs, significantly improving streaming economics and viewer experience alike.

Blockcast × DAWN: Solving the Wireless Multicast Challenge

As DAWN leads the transition towards a predominantly wireless future, we're set to face the same challenge as wired networks—efficiently scaling live content distribution. On wireless infrastructure, bandwidth isn’t the only limitation; airtime itself becomes precious. Airtime refers to the finite amount of time available for wireless devices to transmit or receive data over a shared radio frequency. Because wireless spectrum is limited, devices must take turns using it. And every moment of airtime used by one device directly reduces what's available for others, making it an extremely precious resource in wireless networking. When a node repeatedly transmits identical video content separately to multiple receiving nodes, it unnecessarily consumes valuable airtime, degrading performance for everyone on the network.

This is precisely where multicast shines. Imagine a scenario during the Artemis livestream, where a single DAWN node wirelessly forwards the same UHD video to dozens (or even hundreds) of viewers across a city using an outdoor antenna. Instead of each viewer demanding their own airtime slice, multicast allows receiving nodes to simultaneously share a single airslice for the video, dramatically improving airtime efficiency and freeing up bandwidth for everyone else.

The secret to this efficiency lies in Time Division Duplexing (TDD). Modern outdoor wireless radios optimize their performance using TDD, which coordinates precise transmit and receive timeslots to prevent collisions and interference. Most vendors already support multicast transmission natively within their TDD implementation, yet what's historically been missing is a seamless coordination layer that connects content providers, consumers, and hardware vendors into a unified system.

Blockcast and DAWN together fill this gap. The Black Box’s software-based routing provides the perfect integration point for a high-performance multicast coordination layer. With DAWN and Blockcast working together, multicast delivery simply works out of the box and creates a new standard for provider edge routing, and consumer CPEs (customer premises equipment).

The next frontier also includes bringing synchronized TDD strategies to indoor WiFi mesh networks as well, moving away from traditional CSMA/CA (the contention-based method currently used by WiFi) and towards synchronized timeslot management. By introducing multicast coordination to indoor meshing, Blockcast and DAWN not only enables massive scaling for global streaming events like Artemis, but significantly enhances everyday WiFi performance in residential and enterprise environments.

With Blockcast integrated into the DAWN Black Box, multicast streaming ceases to be a niche or complicated solution—it becomes the default, the inevitable standard for tomorrow’s internet. DAWN and Blockcast are making sure our wireless-first future is prepared not just for Artemis-scale livestreams, but for every streaming event that follows, ensuring pristine, congestion-free connectivity for decades to come.

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