🛜 Show me the money

Gm! It’s time for a piping hot Empire exclusive to pair with your coffee.

Two VanEck funds are putting their money where their mouths are and investing $2.5 million into decentralized internet service provider DAWN. The investment comes from VanEck’s Digital Assets Alpha fund and VanEck Ventures.

This is the first time that “multiple funds at VanEck have made a direct investment into the same company,” the firm exclusively told Empire. Though I, of course, have to caveat that VanEck Ventures is a rather new fund, only announced back in October (as some Empire readers will remember).

DAWN offers a product that’s not only “economically competitive” but also challenges the “monopolistic nature” of legacy internet service providers, VanEck Ventures general partner Wyatt Lonergan told me. 

If you’ve hit the memecoin jackpot, $2.5 million might seem like small potatoes but it aligns perfectly with what Lonergan told us back in October: The goal for his fund is to find and support early-stage projects with checks ranging from $500,000 to $1 million.

If DAWN sounds familiar and you’re not usually in the DePIN crowd, it’s probably because Andrena, the company behind DAWN, raised $18 million in a round back in August. A round, actually, that Empire’s very own Jason Yanowitz participated in. 

Andrena CEO Neil Chatterjee told me that DAWN was designed to capitalize on the “transformation of our lives” as society goes from being wired into the internet to being completely wireless following the rollouts of 5G and Starlink.

“So now that we are kind of as a society going from a transition from a wired society to a more wireless one, we can actually use that wireless transformation in a way that we can wield it to benefit the end consumer, to benefit the end household, in a way [so they] are owning their own network. With this new transformation, we want homes to be the ones that are taking the benefit,” he explained. 

The hardware can be used to reshare internet “no matter what provider you’re with,” and doesn’t need to be DAWN’s specific internet, the Andrena team explained. The aim is to give “anybody all across the globe that has underutilized bandwidth…the means to sell it without having to worry about the customer acquisition.”

The $2.5 million figure will partially be used to scale retail engagement through the hardware, allowing users to create mini networks for internet sharing and expand internationally. Right now, the user base is predominantly in the US. 

Chatterjee’s team is looking for “partnerships with data centers, internet service providers, real estate — companies that can kind of give you a very big footprint very quickly, and then we'll be using our capital to help expedite that deployment process.”

The two biggest goals for the team are trickled down through their plans: onchain revenue and households. Chatterjee declined to give specifics on either metric, but noted that the team is moving to get both in the “millions.”

The project aims to disrupt the monopoly held by traditional ISPs while giving “the consumer a better product, [and putting] them in control, [so the] token is kind of pouring fuel on the fire. It creates the really amazing network effects that you wouldn't otherwise get and turns these users into owners. And that kind of strengthens the entire network, in our opinion. So I love the idea of using these mesh networks to bootstrap businesses that otherwise would be really hard to do. That is kind of the promise of tokens,” Lonergan said.

But what really drew him, and the Digital Assets Alpha Fund, was the team behind DAWN. 

“WiFi is something, to me, that’s really easy to understand,” he explained, pushing this project more mainstream than other crypto projects (or so one can hope). VanEck’s goal is to back a “category-winning team,” and, clearly, that’s what the two funds believe DAWN to be.

— Katherine

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The evolution of finance isn’t coming — it’s already here.

This March, DAS NYC 2025 unites institutional leaders, allocators and fund managers to explore the forces reshaping global finance. From macroeconomic dynamics to the rise of onchain economies, this is where visionaries connect, insights emerge, and the next era takes shape.

March 18-20, 2025 | NYC | Javits Center North

• BTC hit $106,352 earlier this morning, a new all-time high. It has since retraced slightly to under $104,000.

• Bitcoin dominance is back above 57.6% after hitting a near-six month low of 54.8% at the start of December.

• HYPE, VIRTUAL and AAVE lead top-100 altcoins for weekly gains, with 105%, 83% and 46% apiece.

• Ethena’s USDe is now easily the third largest stablecoin by supply with $5.86 billion. USDe flipped DAI earlier this month after growing 85% in the last 30 days.

• The amount of ETH staked directly to the chain has fallen to just over 33.95 million, down almost 2% since its November peak. ETH has risen 23% in that time.

🎈 Hot air rises

DAWN’s goal is lofty. All the best ones are.

Aiming to enable regular consumers to serve each other broadband — and be rewarded for it with crypto — is similar to what Helium has done for mobile coverage over the past few years.

DAWN is positioning itself as a decentralized protocol for gigabit-level internet access, as in, download speeds of over 1 gigabyte per second (1,000 megabytes per second).

Helium hotspots, on the other hand, generally offer a 5G-grade service. 

There are technically no minimum and maximum levels for how fast 5G internet can be. Helium users have reported download speeds ranging from under 100 megabytes per second to actual gigabit ranges. But it depends on the area, with factors including user demand, density and quality of the hotspots available.

Still, Helium plays a role in DAWN’s future, whether it likes it or not. Helium is the most obvious benchmark for DePIN adoption right now, especially for projects vying to disrupt services like telecoms and the internet. 

And considering DAWN is utilizing Solana for its tokenomics — as does Helium since it switched from its own network in April 2023 — the two are destined to be compared against each other ad infinitum. 

It could be that DAWN may only really be considered a success if it can eclipse Helium in certain metrics. 

While the subscription rates of Helium’s mobile service have slowed somewhat (105 per day on average this quarter compared to 225 in Q3), users are spending more than ever to use the network. At least since Helium swapped over to Solana as usage data before the jump is apparently no longer publicly available.

Helium users spent almost $63,000 and $56,000 on data in the first two weeks of December, as shown by the light green columns on the above chart. The price of HNT is otherwise plotted by the purple line.

In a way, DAWN is a bet on that number increasing dramatically from here. And what’s good for Helium could be good for DAWN — as long as the latter successfully channels that energy towards the home, rather than the hotspot.

— David

• The owner of the squirrel formerly known as Peanut, and the inspiration for the PNUT memecoin, sent Binance a cease-and-desist for listing the coin. 

• MicroStrategy snapped up 15,350 bitcoin for $1.5 billion, the company announced Monday.

• An Austin man who “falsely” underreported capital gains he earned from selling around $4 million bitcoin was sentenced to two years in prison. 

• The United Kingdom plans to ban public offers of crypto, the Financial Conduct Authority said in a paper. 

• Trump-supported World Liberty Financial snapped up AAVE and LINK, adding to its token stash.

Q: Is DePIN just for hobbyists?

It’s not just DePIN. The same thing can be said of the market’s biggest blockchains.

Essentially, DePIN boils down to setting up some piece of hardware that services external users in some way, in return for tokens.

With that in mind, Bitcoin was actually the first DePIN venture in crypto. But Bitcoin and all other chains eventually run into the same problem: Not everybody wants to maintain a dedicated machine to run a node. Especially if it’s expensive or technically demanding.

The Ethereum network is held up by around 6,000 nodes right now. One year ago, over 7,500. Five years ago, there were more than 8,100. 

ETH the currency might not be just for hobbyists. But keeping the network online almost certainly is, outside of the businesses that do.

— David

Right now, absolutely. 

I was actually on a Twitter Spaces last Friday and when the subject of DePINs was brought up, the comments made were all focused on how the adoption isn’t there. 

I always, as you all know, caveat that with a yet because we just don’t know if it’s too early until, well, it’s too late. 

But my take, and what I shared with listeners on Friday, is that (some) DePINs arguably have the best chances to resonate with a wider (read: not just crypto-centric) audience. Lonergan’s point about WiFi above is something I agree with, honestly. 

Whether or not that translates to the non-hobbyist groups is not clear yet, but you best believe I’m bringing up projects like Helium and DAWN at the Christmas dinner table next week.

— Katherine