The Challenge of Modern Video Streaming
The internet, originally designed for text and static files, now grapples with the immense demand for real-time video. Video traffic constitutes over half of global internet usage and is projected to grow significantly, outpacing the capacity of traditional Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). While CDNs like Akamai and Cloudflare have scaled to meet some of this demand, their capital-intensive model struggles with escalating traffic and the unpredictable surges characteristic of live events.
This strain is evident in persistent buffering and quality drops, especially outside major markets. The NBC Peacock NFL Wild Card stream in January 2024, for example, consumed a substantial portion of U.S. internet traffic, highlighting the fundamental challenge of large-scale streaming. Beyond technical limitations, the reliance on a few centralized CDN providers creates points of fragility. Past incidents, such as the AWS DNS failure in October 2025 and outages at Cloudflare, Akamai, and Fastly, underscore the internet's vulnerability to disruptions within these core intermediaries.
The current CDN model faces three primary structural bottlenecks: the high cost of scaling bandwidth with each additional viewer, geographic disparities in server presence leading to performance issues in less connected regions, and a lack of transparency in how content providers are billed and how their content is routed. This opaque attribution makes it difficult for publishers to verify value for money and control their distribution costs.
The Rise of DePIN and the Bandwidth Frontier
Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) offer a promising alternative, enabling critical internet resources to be distributed across millions of participants rather than controlled by a few large corporations. Previous DePIN projects have successfully crowdsourced wireless coverage (Helium), data storage (Filecoin), and computing power (Akash), demonstrating cost reductions and expanded coverage. However, bandwidth has remained largely untouched by this decentralized model.
Tayga and its first application, Rilla, aim to fill this gap by treating bandwidth as a programmable asset. Rilla is a real-time peer-to-peer protocol that utilizes intelligent orchestration to connect everyday devices, transforming them into a network for delivering live video. Instead of relying on centralized servers and caches, Rilla creates a dynamic mesh where viewers act as passive relay nodes, forwarding video streams to nearby peers.
This approach allows the network's delivery capacity to grow organically with the audience size, scaling horizontally rather than relying on massive data centers. Each device contributing bandwidth earns cryptographic attribution, providing a verifiable record for incentivized rewards, similar to how Bitcoin nodes are rewarded for their work.
AI-Powered Orchestration for P2P Reliability
A key innovation of Rilla is its AI coordination engine, designed to overcome the reliability issues that plagued earlier peer-to-peer streaming attempts. While previous systems struggled with the volatility of nodes joining and leaving, Rilla's AI continuously monitors bandwidth, latency, and buffer status, making split-second routing decisions to maintain stream quality.
If a device disconnects or slows down, the AI seamlessly reroutes the stream through alternative peers. In instances of regional demand spikes, the AI can leverage Tayga's hyper-edge capacity within that specific area to bolster local content availability. The AI optimizes routing not just for load balancing but also for latency, quality, and cost, ensuring content is delivered from the most optimal source. This adaptive routing mechanism allows the network to self-heal in real-time, converting churn into resilience.
This AI-driven coordination is crucial for achieving "sequentially consistent" delivery, meaning video segments are received in the correct order within a given time window, enabling low-latency live streaming at scale. Unlike earlier P2P systems that were "eventually consistent" and prone to failure during live broadcasts, Rilla's AI acts as a real-time traffic and air traffic controller. It continuously monitors connections, predicts bottlenecks, and proactively shifts traffic, ensuring continuity even during sudden surges in viewership. Every unit of video forwarded is tied to a cryptographic proof, building a verifiable ledger of service and enabling fair rewards while ensuring accountability.
Tayga's Programmable Hyper-Edge Economy
Tayga reframes bandwidth as programmable and ephemeral infrastructure, built on three core layers:
- •Edge Resource Discovery: This layer identifies and connects applications to optimal edge resources based on cost, performance, and policy objectives.
- •Verifiable Delivery: This layer records the use of resources as compact, auditable proofs, ensuring transparent accountability without exposing sensitive data.
- •Incentivized Performance: This layer aligns economic rewards with verified contributions, fostering a self-optimizing ecosystem that encourages reliability and long-term participation.
This architecture creates a "programmable hyper-edge economy" where everyday devices contribute to a distributed network. Tayga and Rilla represent the first steps towards the "Open Edge," where bandwidth, storage, and compute are accessible resources provided through an open, public protocol with transparent rules. Unlike traditional CDNs that pre-provision capacity at static prices, Rilla's network is elastic and market-driven, with capacity appearing precisely where and when viewers need it, driven by incentives.
Bandwidth: The Next DePIN Frontier and Economic Implications
The global CDN market is substantial and growing rapidly, projected to reach $33 billion by 2025 and double over the next decade, fueled by video consumption. Online video already accounts for 82% of all internet traffic, with live streaming, sports, esports, and concerts driving intense, localized traffic surges. Mobile data traffic is also growing significantly, with video being the primary driver.
Major platforms account for a significant portion of internet traffic, making content delivery costs and constraints a critical concern for tech and media giants. When a single streaming event can strain national internet capacity and bandwidth fees represent a major expense, the incentive for new solutions is immense. While traditional CDNs remain vital, they are often over- or under-provisioned.
Rilla's peer-to-peer approach offers a self-scaling solution that aligns with demand. When a stream goes viral, the surge in viewers brings a corresponding surge in local capacity. This allows Rilla to absorb viral spikes that would overwhelm static CDNs, without requiring significant upfront capital investment in new data centers.
Two key trends make Rilla's approach particularly timely: the explosion of live content, which creates massive, transient traffic surges that peer meshes handle efficiently, and the significant economic benefits of increased delivery efficiency. Even a modest percentage gain in video delivery efficiency can lead to substantial savings in bandwidth. A 60-90% cost reduction is not incremental; it can save major companies millions and make previously cost-prohibitive markets accessible.
By recruiting upstream bandwidth from nearby peers, rewarding contributors directly, and dynamically stabilizing streams via AI, Rilla offers a path to scale live video without the usual trade-offs of high infrastructure investment or compromised quality. This model transforms streaming infrastructure into a self-paying asset through community participation, reversing the traditional CDN business model where value flows outward to network participants rather than inward to a few providers.
The implications of this approach are far-reaching. It envisions a future where massive live events can be streamed to millions without requiring extensive server overbuilds, leveraging the idle bandwidth of viewers' neighborhoods. This could drastically cut costs, minimize outages, and improve quality, especially in remote regions where connectivity is limited. Rilla, though early in its development, is already collaborating with media giants, representing a significant rethinking of content delivery for the 21st century.
The Team Behind Tayga
The leadership team behind Tayga brings together extensive experience in systems engineering, protocol design, and commercial execution within the media and real-time infrastructure sectors.
Hal Smith Stevens, Founder & CEO, is a systems engineer with a career focused on building infrastructure in demanding environments, including AI systems for emergency rooms and coordination platforms for air traffic operations. He previously co-founded Altered State Machine, which developed tokenized AI models integrated with global brands.
Pulasthi Bandara, Chief Technology Officer, is a computer scientist with expertise in AI, natural language processing, computer vision, and decentralized network architecture. He led engineering at Altered State Machine, overseeing production-scale data systems and full-stack infrastructure. At Tayga Labs, he directs the implementation of AI coordination logic and cryptographic attribution layers.
Justin Tomlinson, Chief Commercial Officer, is a senior media and product executive with over twenty years of experience in international broadcasting and digital entertainment. As Director of Technology and Product at Sky Europe (Comcast), he managed digital transformations across live sports, on-demand platforms, and large audience experiences.
The Open Edge: Infrastructure That Pays Back
Rilla and the Tayga protocol demonstrate that bandwidth can be managed as a programmable, verifiable, and user-provided resource, similar to storage and compute in the decentralized ecosystem. By successfully proving this model with live video, the potential expands to other domains such as edge AI training and inference, game streaming, large file distribution, and software updates.
The broader concept of the "Open Edge" envisions internet infrastructure emerging dynamically from everyday devices. Instead of capacity being confined to distant data centers, delivery becomes local, adaptive, and community-shaped. This paradigm shift redirects value from major CDN providers to the network participants, the communities consuming the content.
As Hal Smith Stevens posits, the internet was originally designed for peer-to-peer communication. Tayga operationalizes this philosophy by using modern AI and crypto tools to enable trustworthy, scaled sharing of connections among users. This approach promises a future where delivering content to massive audiences is significantly more cost-effective and reliable, potentially making high-quality streaming accessible even in remote areas with limited connectivity.