Non-Core Categories
Beyond the eight core DePIN categories, we track four DePIN-adjacent categories.
| Demand-side: Job-to-be-Done | |
|---|---|
| Blockchain Infra | Provide onchain services |
| Real World Assets | Tokenize offchain assets |
| Science | Generate and proliferate scientific knowledge |
| Intellectual Property | Generate and proliferate intellectual property |
Blockchain Infrastructure networks provide trust-minimized onchain services like RPCs, oracles, namespaces, attestations, automations and security audits. Real World Asset (RWA) protocols provide tokenized representations of offchain assets like treasuries, real estate or collectibles in order to make them composable with DeFi. Decentralized Science (DeSci) networks incentivize the generation and proliferation of scientific knowledge. DeSci is a special case of Decentralized IP networks that seek to do the same for all types of intellectual property.
DePIN-related companies that are not networks themselves, but act as gateways, miners, manufacturers, service providers or customers of other DePINs on the list are tagged as apps in the database. Projects that fall in the four DePIN-adjacent categories and/or the apps designation are considered Non-Core. Non-Core projects are included in the full list of projects, but are excluded from all summary metrics and charts. Contributors earn 5 USDC for each new non-core project added.
Over time, we’ve developed a list of common categorization disputes:
- AI-focused networks that produce one of the key inputs to machine intelligence - e.g., energy, compute or data - but do not directly incentivize the generation of machine intelligence should be classified according to the underlying resource provided.
- Creator-focused content marketplaces - e.g. NFT-based platforms that host songs for musicians, images for digital artists, or videos for adult performers - should be categorized under Intellectual Property because the supply-side (digital content) is permanent in nature. This is distinct from Human Capital marketplaces where the supply-side resource (human labor, reputation or identity) is ephemeral in nature.
- Advertising and loyalty/rewards networks should generally be categorized under Human Capital, since they aggregate domain-specific reputation and use it to connect people with businesses, unless they rely on proprietary sensor data, in which case they should be categorized under Sensors.