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Althea Network is a blockchain-based project launched in 2018 which provides internet access and a series of connectivity services as payments and tokenization in existing utilities; they are focused on empowering communities and localities with no access to internet worldwide —35% of humanity in 2023— but also on unlocking the economic potential of the existing telecom infrastructures, which according to their vision is vastly underrealized, allowing individuals to invest in components like fiber optic cables or parts of cell towers.
So far it provided a series of services as a company and it’s now launching the blockchain infrastructure around them, differently than most crypto projects starting from the protocol and aiming at developing products if and when the protocol gets enough funding. Althea blockchain is a Layer 1 blockchain based on Cosmos SDK, and they describe themselves as permissionless, high-availability Hybrid EVM. The team prefers to be conceived in the category of Infrastructure Finance (InFi) rather than Decentralized Physical Infrastructure (DePIn), but they inhabit both.
Althea Network is on CER as it’s giving an invaluable and unique contribution to the development of a truly global open distributed internet, based on local cooperative communities; they are doing so in an economically sustainable way and moving soon toward decentralized governance of the protocol. It’s one of the clearest examples of why and how blockchain technology can and should be used, showing the way to go not only for the provision of internet access but for next generation basic needs infrastructures of all kinds.