DePIN: New Trends in Old Tracks

"We are connecting the future energy internet with the devices around you."

Some DePIN projects achieve sustainable profitability by solving existing problems, even without relying on the flywheel effect of token economics.

However, amidst the distortions and despair of this structural bull market, a brand new era is quietly approaching.

As one of the important drivers of cryptocurrency moving towards the mainstream, the DePIN ecosystem shows strong development momentum and has become one of the main investment lines attracting capital influx to date.

Among more than 370 DePIN tokens, 75% focus on virtual services (such as AI and computing), while the remaining 25% provide physical services (such as wireless, energy, and sensors).

Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) is a cutting-edge concept that combines blockchain technology with the Internet of Things (IoT), gradually attracting widespread attention both within and outside the industry. DePIN redefines the management and control model of physical devices through a decentralized architecture, demonstrating the potential to trigger disruptive changes in the traditional infrastructure sector.

On August 16, the EMC Layer 1 blockchain testnet was officially launched, allowing users to earn EMC tokens through "mining."

The market value of DePIN has surpassed 20 billion dollars, and it is expected to have 20 times more growth potential in the future.

In the first half of 2024, the cryptocurrency market shows a trend of diversification, with three major sectors standing out: Gamefi, Bitcoin Layer 2 networks, and decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN).

As a leading project in the ZK hardware acceleration track, the Cysic project can be summarized in three aspects: efficiency, universality, and decentralization.

Can the DePIN world become the engine of a bull market? Representative leading projects become key.

Calculating DePINs allows individual developers, scattered builders, and startups with minimal funds and resources to return.

Although early DePIN projects attracted considerable attention by designing token frameworks, token issuance may not be sufficient to ensure long-term participation of nodes in the network. If running a node is not profitable, node operators will no longer have the incentive to operate DePIN infrastructure. Therefore, the DePIN founding team must help optimize the costs for node operators.

This article reviews four major DePIN projects in Solana: Render Network, Helium, Hivemapper, and ShdwDrive, analyzing on-chain data and the latest developments of the projects.

The core definition of DePIN lies in bringing real-world users into Web3, achieving cost-effectiveness and socialization through decentralized networks.

In 2023, the DePIN market experienced explosive growth, with the overall market value of the sector that started its track in October last year skyrocketing from $5 billion to $10 billion by the end of the year. With the bull market driven by ETFs, the DePIN sector is expected to usher in another round of rapid growth.

io.net is a decentralized GPU network that provides computing resources for machine learning, with a market value of $1 billion, expected to exceed $5 billion during the bull market cycle.

The year 2024 will be a big year for the DePIN track.

The success of the business model and the breakthrough of technology will always be balanced, and DePIN is accelerating this process. DePIN's "hunting journey" will also yield fruitful results.