Reprint Interpretation | The Imperfect Status and Bright Future of DePIN: A Depth Analysis

This article is from Compound, written by Knower and Smac.

Release Date: September 12, 2024

Original link:

Editor’s Note

Why is this research report worth reading?

• DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network) explores how to leverage decentralized technology to build and manage physical facilities in the real world, which could disrupt many traditional industries. Understanding DePIN is crucial for grasping the future development of Web3.
• This article systematically breaks down DePIN into six major subcategories from macro to micro, covering core areas such as telecommunications, energy, computing power, decentralized AI, data, and services, outlining a complete ecological map for readers. Moreover, there are real operational data of leading projects in each field, revealing project scale, user growth, and business models.
• This article does not blindly extol the bright prospects of DePIN, but rather clearly points out the severe challenges faced by current DePIN projects, especially the “imperfect reality,” such as the sustainability issues of token economic models, the real obstacles in competing with centralized giants, and the potential impacts of future technologies (such as 6G, photonic computing, and distributed training). This balanced perspective helps readers to more rationally assess the field.

To help everyone quickly grasp the main points of the article, we have summarized this research report.

In addition, DePINone Labs has provided a complete translation and organization of it, highlighting its key content for easy collection and sharing.

Key Points TL; DR

This report delves into the concept, current status, challenges, and future of DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network).

DePIN aims to reshape the construction and management model of traditional physical infrastructure through blockchain and decentralized incentives, achieving higher resource utilization, transparency, and resilient ownership. The article points out that true disruption lies in addressing the pain points of high costs and low efficiency in centralized models, rather than merely “decentralization.”

The report divides the DePIN field into six major subcategories:

• Telecom & Connectivity: An in-depth analysis of the technology paths and market positioning of projects such as Helium, Karrier, Really, Andrena, Althea, Dabba, and WiCrypt, from DeWi to fixed wireless and public WiFi.
• Energy: Distributed Energy Resources (DER), Virtual Power Plants (VPP), and on-chain financing platforms, covering the business models and regulatory challenges of protocols such as Daylight, SCRFUL, Plural Energy, Glow, StarPower, and Power Ledger.
• Compute, Storage & Bandwidth: Discuss the performance and differences of decentralized computing markets such as Akash, Fluence, IONet, Hyperbolic, Render, Livepeer, as well as storage networks like Jackal, Arweave, and Filecoin.
• Decentralized AI: List projects such as Prime Intellect, Bittensor, Gensyn, Prodia, Ritual, Grass, and analyze the prospects of the integration of decentralized training, validation, and data layers.
• Data Capture & Management: Emphasizes the market value and monetization challenges of content distribution, mapping, localization, and climate/weather data.
• Services: Showcases innovative use cases driven by crypto incentives in the real world, such as Dimo, PuffPaw, Heale, Silencio, Blackbird, and Shaga.

Although DePIN shows great potential and is considered one of the most sustainable investment directions in the crypto space for the long term, it is still in the early stages of development and faces many “imperfect” real-world challenges, such as issues with token economic models, genuine demand and adoption, supply and demand imbalance, competition, and regulation.

Despite numerous challenges, the report remains optimistic about the future of DePIN (“bright future”), believing that its long-term potential is enormous.

The key to future development lies in addressing the sustainability issues of token economies, focusing on solving meaningful real-world problems, and potentially finding breakthroughs in innovative fields such as environmental monitoring, biological data, and personal data sharing (such as the bioacoustics, eDNA, and sleep/dream data mentioned in the report), thereby guiding the direction for subsequent innovations.

To gain a deeper understanding of the technical architecture and evolution path of DePIN, please explore the complete analysis 👇

DePIN’s Imperfect Present & Promising Future: A Deep Dive