Description
Since 2018, Althea has developed technology that brings blockchain-enabled internet access to underserved and hard-to-reach communities, deploying mesh and wireless ISP networks in places such as Medellín (Colombia), Nigeria, Ghana, Puerto Rico, and rural areas of the United States (North Carolina, Illinois, Montana, Washington/Tacoma) in partnership with local nonprofits, cooperatives, and ISPs. Its core product, Althea L1, is a high-availability EVM blockchain built with the Cosmos SDK and Tendermint consensus, designed to serve as a settlement layer for infrastructure and machine-to-machine micropayments, featuring Contract-Secure Revenue for developers and a hardware-agnostic Althea Wallet that can be embedded in routers, IoT devices, and other networked hardware. Althea also offers Liquid Infrastructure (iFi), which enables real estate owners, utility companies, and developers to tokenize and fractionally own networked infrastructure such as fiber and cell towers, unlocking new liquidity and funding mechanisms. Additional public-goods initiatives associated with Althea include Gravity Bridge, AgFiber, KeyLTE, and price-aware/pay-for-forward routing protocols. The company also operates Hawk Networks, an ISP service, and continues active development (e.g., the 2025 Cardinal update to Althea L1), serving rural communities, tribal lands, ISPs, utility companies, and Web3 developers.