Youbi Capital: Why Did We Invest in Meson Network?
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Youbi Capital: Why Did We Invest in Meson Network?
Meson Network is a large-scale decentralized bandwidth marketplace that aims to build the infrastructure for a public data distribution network.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthors: Melrose, Chen Li, Li Gong
Corresponding Authors: Bjeast, Enzo, Youbi Research Team
In late January, leading AI DePIN project Meson announced a strategic funding round at a $1 billion valuation, with plans to launch on OKX spot trading on April 29. Youbi Capital is honored to have participated in Meson’s seed round during its early stages, alongside other outstanding investors such as HashKey Capital, SevenX Ventures, and Mask Network.
What is Meson Network?
A decentralized bandwidth marketplace aggregating long-tail market bandwidth and IP resources through the DePIN model, combined with IDC services to deliver high-quality data collection and distribution.
Meson Network is a large-scale decentralized bandwidth trading market aiming to build foundational infrastructure for public data distribution. Suppliers from different regions worldwide can offer their idle commercial-grade or residential bandwidth at relatively low prices to users with data transmission needs. Primarily leveraging the DePIN shared economy model, Meson effectively serves diverse and abundant long-tail market demands, forming a complete commercial ecosystem. In addition, Meson collaborates with IDC service providers to deliver higher-quality services for enterprise clients, meeting comprehensive market requirements.
Meson Network consists of three main components:
1) **Gateway X** primarily targets enterprise-level bandwidth and IP providers globally. Large server owners—such as internet data centers or cloud service providers—can use the Gateway X platform to offer their idle bandwidth resources, providing stable and reliable storage and data transmission services to enterprise clients. Meson has already partnered with AWS to help participants quickly deploy Meson nodes. This support for enterprise-grade infrastructure partially mitigates potential risks and limitations inherent in DePIN models. Commercial-grade equipment provides Meson with higher-quality infrastructure, ensuring operational stability and paving the way for collaborations with prominent projects like BNB Chain, Arbitrum, and Arweave.
2) **GaGaNode**, unlike Gateway X, enables individual devices to supply bandwidth to the market. Users can leverage any idle device—Android phones, TV Boxes, Raspberry Pis, or even PlayStations—as nodes within the Meson network. This demonstrates Meson’s exceptional flexibility in hardware compatibility, fully aligning with core DePIN principles. The diversity of supported devices and low entry barriers facilitate large-scale network expansion, increasing node count and geographic coverage, thereby enhancing the quality of IP-based data transmission services offered by Meson.
3) **IPCola** is a user-facing IP service marketplace that aggregates bandwidth resources supplied by nodes from both Gateway X and GaGaNode, reselling them at competitive prices. Revenue generated flows back to contributing nodes. IPCola represents Meson’s most direct monetization model, transforming contributed node resources into sustainable income beyond mere data transmission. It offers various IP services—including dynamic IPs and static residential IPs—covering virtually all user IP-related needs.
Meson Network Data Overview
Meson Network currently boasts over 210,000 nodes, nearly 40,000 of which are provided by enterprise-level service providers. Nodes are distributed across all continents, with denser deployments in Web3-developed regions such as Asia, Europe, and North America. Additionally, GaGaNode accounts for nearly 180,000 nodes, reflecting massive participation from individual contributors supplying bandwidth resources. From a data perspective, Meson Network demonstrates strong performance, fully leveraging the advantages of the DePIN model to attract a substantial number of personal devices into the network. This extensive node count and broad geographic coverage serve as a solid foundation for Meson’s service quality.
DePIN + AI: The Public Data Collection Engine
If GPU resources are the new "oil," then undoubtedly, data is the new "gold" for AI—public data collected by Meson is critically important.
Currently, influenced by the AI wave, more professionals in the blockchain industry are exploring integrations between blockchain and artificial intelligence. As Crypto+AI products become increasingly diverse, supporting infrastructure becomes ever more crucial. While most DePIN projects focus on delivering AI computing power, Meson stands out as the only project dedicated to collecting public data for AI training, providing more decentralized and diverse datasets—serving as the "gold" in AI model training.
The first step for Meson to become AI's "gold" is collecting IPs via the DePIN model. GaGa Node, operating at the physical hardware layer, leverages token incentives to enable Meson to gather idle bandwidth from around the world in a decentralized manner.
For IP resources, geographic breadth is paramount. Under this premise, DePIN’s decentralized integration proves far more efficient than centralized approaches. Meson doesn’t need to establish regional offices or negotiate with local agents to gain network access across different regions—instead, it naturally attracts idle IP resources into its ecosystem. With low hardware requirements and minimal technical constraints, Meson fully unlocks the potential of the DePIN model.
After GaGa Nodes aggregate bandwidth devices, IPCola processes these resources into a structured data collection layer, offering them via API for end users. Users can leverage these APIs to extract publicly available data restricted by IP addresses. For example, websites like CoinMarketCap may block your IP after approximately 45 token queries, ceasing further information delivery. By rotating through different IPs via IPCola, users can significantly expand the volume of otherwise unrestricted public data collected, ultimately compiling valuable datasets for AI training. This creates a seamless consumer-facing service, while diverse geographical IPs allow retrieval of region-specific content—data richness that is extremely valuable for AI models.
Meson’s entire operational workflow extends well beyond traditional DePIN applications—it functions as database infrastructure tailored for AI, analogous in scope to Google Cloud and Google Crawlers within the IoT space. Considering valuations, these two giants exceed a combined $1.7 trillion. Although Meson, as a Web3 project, won’t scale at the same pace, this comparison highlights ample room for envisioning Meson’s future potential. Currently, IPCola has already generated millions of dollars in real revenue—an authentic demand-driven income stream.
Overall, IPCola’s large-scale aggregation of public data plays a pivotal role in AI training and Crypto+AI projects. Meson’s product suite aligns perfectly with AI’s evolving needs, positioning it well to ride the AI narrative cycle toward value discovery and explosive growth.
Guardian of Blockchain Infrastructure
Youbi Capital chose to invest in Meson due to our recognition of its critical importance as data transmission infrastructure for the broader blockchain industry.
Beyond its significant contributions to AI, Meson also plays an essential role in blockchain infrastructure. With the continuous emergence of Layer 1 chains and Rollups, growing infrastructure complexity presents acute operational challenges. For Layer 1 networks, the proliferation of public chains means nodes spread across wider geographies, resulting in increased network latency that hinders inter-node synchronization and fast blockchain operations. Meson’s accelerated data transmission offers an efficient solution—its nodes act as relays for blockchain ledger data, distributing information to nearby chain nodes to achieve rapid network synchronization. Similarly, for Layer 2 solutions, Meson helps second-layer networks cache growing volumes of transaction data, enabling faster verification by nodes and safeguarding L2 scalability under heavy transaction loads. Meson has already partnered with several major blockchain projects:
1) **BNB Chain** leveraged Meson Network’s globally distributed nodes to accelerate data distribution, reducing BSC node snapshot synchronization time from 20 hours down to just 1 hour—dramatically improving BSC’s network efficiency.
2) **Arbitrum** partnered with Meson Network to launch a decentralized RPC service, greatly optimizing request routing among nodes and enhancing overall network stability and performance.
3) **OKX Chain** has integrated Meson Network to ensure secure network operations, preventing single points of failure associated with centralized data distribution services, while also accelerating inter-node communication.
Like L1 and L2 chains, decentralized storage systems share similar demands for efficient data transmission and synchronization. In the decentralized storage domain, Meson’s extensive node coverage accelerates user access and retrieval of stored data. By distributing network load and shortening communication distances, Meson significantly reduces data access latency. Thanks to its superior infrastructure services, Meson has become the largest decentralized gateway behind IPFS and Arweave. Notably, Sam Williams, co-founder of Arweave, is also an investor in Meson.
Overall, Meson’s offerings directly address hard infrastructure demands from both blockchain and decentralized storage ecosystems, supporting safe and rapid operations across the blockchain landscape—truly earning its title as the guardian of blockchain networks.
Endorsement from Top-Tier Research Institutions
Meson Network’s strong potential to rank among the top 10 DePIN projects.
At the end of last year, leading research firm Messari released its “State of DePIN 2023” report, summarizing and evaluating the DePIN sector’s performance over the past year. The report reveals Messari’s high expectations for DePIN’s future development. Notably, Messari specifically predicted that several Asian DePIN projects would enter the top 10 by market cap around 2024–2025—with Meson Network prominently featured on that list. This inclusion reflects Messari’s clear recognition of Meson’s intrinsic value. We hold a highly optimistic outlook for Meson Network’s future trajectory.
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