Ping Network

TLDR

Ping Network is a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) built on Solana that turns idle internet bandwidth into a monetizable resource. Contributors install the Ping app or run nodes, sharing their unused connection capacity; businesses connect via API to access that shared bandwidth for proxy services, VPN traffic, content delivery, and large-scale data collection. The project reached 200,000 contributors and 800,000 app installs before its token generation event, positioning it as one of the larger bandwidth DePINs in the Solana ecosystem.

Core Mechanism

Ping Network operates as a two-sided marketplace with a straightforward incentive loop. On the supply side, individuals and operators share bandwidth through the Ping mobile apps (iOS and Android) or a Chrome extension; server node operators can also participate with dedicated hardware. Contributors earn Ping Points continuously — one point per ten minutes of active connection — which will convert into $PING tokens at TGE. A referral layer adds 15 percent of an invitee's earned points to the referrer's balance, compounding network growth.

On the demand side, businesses access the aggregated bandwidth pool through a REST API to route traffic through residential, mobile, ISP, or datacenter proxy types. The residential and mobile supply is particularly valuable because it originates from real consumer IP addresses across 190 countries, making it effective for bypassing geo-restrictions and bot detection systems that filter datacenter IPs.

The infrastructure beneath the marketplace uses a decentralized Proof-of-Authority (PoA) validator set for network coordination, with Jito restaking providing economic security. Termina — a modular execution layer on Solana — handles bandwidth session proofs and verifiable rollup coordination, giving the network a cryptographic basis for verifying that contributors actually served the bandwidth they claimed. The validator and rewards distribution system was deployed as a Node Consensus Network (NCN) on Solana Devnet in partnership with Cambrian, with Testnet and Mainnet rollouts planned through 2025.

Incentives are designed to be dynamic: the rewards algorithm directs more Ping Points toward contributors in geographic regions where demand outstrips current supply, nudging the network toward filling coverage gaps rather than over-concentrating in already-saturated regions.

Proxy Services and Use Cases

Ping Network offers four proxy types suited to different business requirements:

Residential proxies route traffic through IPs assigned to home internet connections, providing high trust scores for platforms that flag datacenter traffic. Mobile proxies use IP addresses assigned to cellular devices, the most trusted tier for mobile-native applications and social platform tasks. ISP proxies combine residential-level trust with datacenter-level speed, using addresses assigned by ISPs to infrastructure rather than homes. Datacenter proxies offer the lowest cost and highest throughput for use cases where IP type matters less than raw speed.

Business use cases the platform targets include AI training data collection (gathering large-scale diverse datasets from real user perspectives), ad verification (confirming ad placements appear correctly from different regional viewpoints), competitive price monitoring across geographies, and SEO and SERP data extraction. The network pool exceeds one million proxy IPs, with pricing starting at $0.30 per gigabyte.

Token and Reward Structure

The native token is $PING, which had not launched as of the project's first year. Contributors accumulate Ping Points through the app, with the conversion rate to $PING to be determined at TGE. Planned token utility spans network fee payments, validator staking, and contributor reward distribution. No public tokenomics document disclosing total supply, allocation breakdown, or vesting schedules had been released as of mid-2025.

The points system functions as a pre-token loyalty program. Season 1 metrics — one billion points earned across the contributor base — serve as a benchmark for the eventual token distribution scale. The referral multiplier and the geographic demand-weighting introduce meaningful variance in per-contributor earnings, favoring early participants and those in underserved regions.

Team and Funding

Ping Network was founded in May 2024 by three co-founders: Nazar Fazylov, Ed Patrikeev (CMO), and Andrey F. (CTO). The team describes itself as development-heavy. In December 2024, the project raised a pre-seed round of undisclosed size from Native Crypto, Cogitent Ventures, and more than 280 angel investors via the Echo co-investment platform.

No security audits for the smart contracts or node software were publicly disclosed as of the writing of this description.

Solana Fit

Ping Network is natively designed for Solana from its inception rather than migrated from another chain. The choice reflects Solana's throughput and low transaction costs, which are prerequisites for a protocol that needs to record bandwidth sessions and distribute rewards at scale across hundreds of thousands of contributors without making on-chain fees economically punishing.

The Jito restaking integration places Ping within Solana's emerging restaking ecosystem, using staked SOL to backstop the economic security of the NCN rather than bootstrapping a separate token-based security model from scratch. The Termina integration for session proofs aligns Ping with Solana's modular execution layer work, creating a verifiable off-chain computation layer that anchors to Solana's L1 for settlement.

The Cambrian partnership specifically addressed a developer-experience gap: deploying validator logic for an NCN previously required substantial custom engineering. Cambrian's automated deployment tooling reduced that complexity, enabling the Ping team to stand up the NCN on Devnet without building the full validator infrastructure from scratch.

Taken together, Ping Network sits at the intersection of three currents in the 2024-2025 Solana DePIN wave: bandwidth sharing (alongside competitors like Grass and Nodepay), Jito's growing restaking ecosystem, and Solana's push to be the coordination layer for real-world physical infrastructure beyond finance. With 200,000 contributors already onboarded before token launch, the demand-side scaling question — whether businesses will pay enough to sustain meaningful contributor earnings at that scale — remains the central variable to watch.