What is DePIN?

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

The DePIN movement began in 2014 with the launch of Bitcoin-inspired peer-to-peer networks for file storage, followed by similar experiments for 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 (i.e. “mining”).

Today, there are more than [1,500] DePINs active 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. DePIN has attracted over $[1.5]B of capital investments and commands a circulating market cap of over $[25]B. Despite the explosive growth, DePIN represents less than [8]% of crypto alts market cap and less than [0.01]% of global infrastructure revenues.

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

DePIN is an inevitable global movement.