The Rising Narrative: A Glimpse into the Present and Future of DePIN

Introduction

The Internet, as a symbol of globalization, is actually a product of the peak of the Cold War.

In 1969, the U.S. military, during the "nuclear deterrence" era, hoped to have a network that could avoid centralized single points of failure and autonomously recover in the event of a nuclear strike. Thus, the prototype of the internet, "ARPAnet" (, was born with the original intention of "decentralization" and adopted a fully distributed architecture in the form of "terminal-to-terminal direct connections."

However, over the past 55 years, from Web1 to Web2, the rapid expansion of the golden age of the Internet has instead given rise to a "terminal connecting to servers" centralized architecture with many-to-one relationships, increasingly deviating from its original intention. In the fragmented platform system, Web2 giants have established their dominance, controlling the absolute discretion of the online world and holding significant influence and power over value distribution.

In recent years, the wave of Web3, which champions decentralization and depersonalization, has been gaining momentum. Simply applying decentralization is insufficient to address the fundamental contradictions, as issues such as efficiency bottlenecks and security risks still exist. The core solution lies in how to thoroughly transform the underlying technology stack of the internet to overturn the efficiency and security issues caused by the overly centralized Web2.

In this context, DePIN may offer a new perspective worth noting: by combining the financial attributes and incentive mechanisms of Web3, DePIN can construct an efficient P2P physical resource network, creating a "decentralized physical network infrastructure" and enabling the network to have programmable capabilities, thus aiding in the upgrade of "DePIN+" to build a new entity completely different from traditional internet architecture.

At the same time, the explosive rise of AI in Web3 not only injects new vitality into it but also witnesses a fact: blockchain applications are expanding from on-chain activities to the real world, such as RWA, AI, and DePIN.

The narrative of DePIN also means that the gap between physical reality and the ever-expanding blockchain world is gradually blurring. Next, let's take a look at the present and future of DePIN.

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) Part.1 DePIN Overview: What & Why

What is DePIN?

The concept of DePIN has been widely discussed, but from a整理 perspective, it is still necessary to restate it. Here, we will focus on the basic operational model of DePIN. By definition, DePIN### Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network, a decentralized physical infrastructure network ( is a model that combines physical infrastructure resources with blockchain technology, coordinating global resource collaboration through distributed ledgers, token incentives, and smart contracts.

In short, DePIN creates a "resource sharing + economic incentive" bilateral market by linking hardware with blockchain. This community-driven model is more flexible than traditional single-point resource management and also has greater scalability and robustness.

Generally speaking, a complete DePIN network consists of project parties, off-chain physical devices, suppliers, and demanders, and the basic operational model is divided into five steps:

1. Off-chain hardware devices: usually provided or required by the project party, mainly divided into:

• Customized dedicated hardware: For example, Helium requires users to purchase Helium hardware hotspots manufactured by third-party manufacturers )Hotspot( to provide hotspot signals for nearby IoT devices to earn mining rewards; Hivemapper encourages users to contribute to the map network through its dedicated dashcam )HiveMapper Dashcam(.

• Professional-level hardware: Idle computers equipped with GPU and CPU chips can start supplying computing power/data by simply downloading a browser plugin. For example, with Heurist, owners of idle GPU devices only need to download its miner program and set up a miner node to start earning mining rewards by sharing their computing power. The participation method on io.net specifies that the starting threshold for device networking is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050.

• Smart Mobile Devices: These are lightweight mobile devices such as smartphones, smartwatches, fitness bands, and even rings, which join the DePIN network in two ways: by running node programs to become control endpoints for DePIN hardware; or by directly providing sensor data or computing resources. For example, Silencio uses the built-in microphones of people's smartphones to create dynamic maps of noise pollution around the world; Acurast utilizes the storage space of old phones to build a decentralized cloud that anyone can contribute to.

2. Proof: The data generated by physical devices needs to be uploaded to the on-chain tamper-proof blockchain ledger through off-chain infrastructure, providing stakeholders with transparent and auditable infrastructure operation records to prove that they have made certain efforts to obtain incentives as required. This verification method is called Physical Work Proof ) PoPW (.

3. Identity Verification: After the data is validated, it is necessary to verify the on-chain account address of the device owner, generally using public and private keys for identity verification. The private key is used to generate and sign physical work certificates, while the public key is used by external parties to verify the certificates or as an identity tag for the hardware device )Device ID(.

4. Reward Distribution: After verifying the data, the token rewards obtained from off-chain physical devices will be sent to the on-chain address, which involves the token economics of DePIN. Token economics, as the economic foundation of the data value network, is the key to whether the DePIN project can operate smoothly.

• BME: Token burning mechanism, users on the demand side will burn tokens after purchasing services, thus the degree of deflation is determined by demand; in other words, the stronger the demand, the higher the value of the token.

• SFA: Requires supply-side users to stake tokens to become qualified miners, as supply determines the degree of deflation, meaning the more miners providing services, the higher the value of the tokens.

5. Demand Matching: A DePIN market platform where both buyers and sellers can purchase, sell, or lease, completing the exchange and matching of resources; at the same time, the DePIN market provides real-time market data, including asset prices, historical performance, and energy production data, which helps ensure fair pricing and is typically managed by the decentralized autonomous organization )DAO(, allowing stakeholders to participate in the decision-making process.

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)# Why do we need DePIN?

Here's a simple example. Noise pollution is a particularly common phenomenon in urban life. The quantification of noise pollution data has commercial value not only for real estate developers, hotels, restaurants, and other businesses, but also serves as a reference for urban planning and academic research. However, would you be willing to let a private company install microphones all over your city? Or imagine the initial costs of doing so; how far can its coverage expand? How fast is the expansion rate?

If this is a noise detection network spontaneously formed by users, things become much simpler. For example, Silencio deploys noise pollution sensors through downloads on users' mobile applications, where mobile users establish a global measurement network by providing accurate, hyper-local noise pollution data and earn token rewards in the process. Meanwhile, the platform profits by selling noise pollution data.

This is one of the meanings of DePIN. In traditional physical infrastructure networks like communication networks, cloud services, energy networks, etc. ###, due to huge capital investment and operational maintenance costs, the market is often dominated by large companies or giants, and this centralized industrial characteristic brings several major dilemmas and challenges:

• Centralized control: Controlled by centralized institutions, with a risk of single points of failure, vulnerability to attacks, and low transparency, users have no control over data and operations.

• High entry barriers: New entrants need to overcome substantial capital investment and complex regulatory hurdles, which restrict market competition and innovation.

• Resource waste: Due to centralized management, there is a phenomenon of resource idle or waste, resulting in low resource utilization.

• Insufficient incentive mechanism: There is a lack of effective incentive mechanisms, and users' enthusiasm for participating in and contributing network resources is not high.

The core values of DePIN can be summarized in the following four points:

• Resource Sharing and Digitization: Transforming idle physical resources ( such as storage, communication, and computing power ) into tradable digital assets in a decentralized manner;

• Decentralized Governance: Based on open protocols and cryptoeconomic models, users contribute capital, assets, and labor towards a common goal and are incentivized with transparency and fairness.

• On-chain settlement: Blockchain reduces costs by becoming a single source of a shared ledger for all market participants;

• Innovation: In an open, permissionless global sacred medicine system, the speed of experimentation is an order of magnitude higher than that of centralized infrastructure.

(# Current Status of DePIN Development

Track: As an early field in blockchain development, DePIN has been around for a long time. The first batch of projects established, such as the decentralized network Helium and decentralized storage platforms Storj and Sia, have basically focused on storage and communication technologies.

However, with the continuous development of the Internet and the Internet of Things, the demands for infrastructure and innovation are increasing. DePIN projects mainly expand into computing power, data collection and sharing, wireless, sensors, energy, and so on. However, looking at the current top 10 projects by market capitalization in the DePIN field, most belong to the storage and computing power sectors.

AI is the keyword for DePIN in this cycle, as DePIN is naturally suitable for the decentralized sharing needs of AI data and computing power. This has led to the emergence of a batch of AI DePIN projects dedicated to integrating resources such as computing, storage, networking, and energy on a global scale, providing underlying infrastructure support for the training, inference, and deployment of AI models.

Market Size: According to data from DePIN Ninja, the number of DePIN projects that have launched so far has reached 1,561, with a total market value of approximately $22 billion; regarding the total potential market size of the DePIN sector, Messari made a prediction: by 2028, the DePIN market size may exceed $3.5 trillion, and it could contribute an additional $10 trillion to global GDP over the next decade, reaching $100 trillion 10 years later.

L1/L2: Due to high throughput and low gas fees, current DePIN projects are mainly focused on deployment on the Solana public chain, as well as DePIN dedicated chains like IoTex and Peaq. Meanwhile, Polygon and Arbitrum are gradually becoming rising stars.

As the hardware supply chain has become very mature, project parties do not need to invest a lot of R&D effort. Therefore, according to the focus direction, the current DePIN projects are divided into two directions: one focuses on the middle layer of DePIN; the other focuses on the expansion of the demand side of DePIN.

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( Part.2 DePIN Intermediate Layer

DePIN related IoT devices need to be integrated on a large scale into the blockchain, which presents technical challenges and liquidity pressures, such as hardware design and production, how to achieve reliable transmission and data processing of off-chain data on-chain, and token economics design. As a result, the DePIN track has given rise to middleware that connects devices and the DePIN network, involving connection and bidirectional service aspects, aimed at helping project parties quickly launch DePIN application projects by providing development frameworks, developer tools, overall solutions, and more.

It not only includes developer-friendly tools and one-stop services like DePHY and Swan; it also has the re-staking protocol Parasail specifically serving DePIN, aimed at enhancing the liquidity and value utility of the native tokens in the DePIN network.

)# DePIN infra

• DePHY: Aims to provide open-source hardware solutions, SDKs, and tools for DePIN projects, and reduce the manufacturing and network messaging costs of bridging hardware products to the blockchain through off-chain network nodes operating at 500ms synchronization with the blockchain.

• W3bStream: The off-chain computing protocol W3bstream allows IoTeX DePIN projects to easily generate logic based on smart device data, triggering blockchain operations. Some well-known IoTeX-based DePIN projects include Envirobloq.