What is DePIN?

Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks, or DePIN, is a global movement that empowers and incentivizes citizens to build and improve on public infrastructure. DePINs are peer-to-peer networks with the potential to re-architect legacy industries like telecommunications, cloud computing and renewable energy by leveraging the power of collective collaboration uniquely enabled by public blockchains.

DePIN began with the emergence of Bitcoin-inspired peer-to-peer networks for file storage in 2014, followed by compute in 2017 and bandwidth in 2019. In order to bootstrap supply, these networks rewarded early contributors with outsized economics via programmatic token incentives for connecting hardware resources, often referred to as “mining".

Today, there are more than 1,500 DePINs globally across domains as far-reaching as wearables and healthcare, logistics and the gig economy, robotics and drones, augmented and virtual reality, machine learning and agent frameworks, and much more. DePINs have attracted more than a billion dollars of investment and command an aggregate circulating market cap of over $25 billion. Despite the explosive growth in recent years, DePIN represents less than 8% of crypto alts market cap and less than 0.01% of global infrastructure revenues.

Citizens everywhere are waking up to the value of sovereign infrastructure. In a world full of incompetent bureaucrats and untrustworthy institutions, DePIN is catalyzing a global transfer of wealth and power back to the communities who deserve it. As this new paradigm proliferates, trillions of dollars of value will shift from today’s centralized infrastructure monopolies into tomorrow’s decentralized infrastructure networks.

DePIN is an inevitable global movement.