DePIN, or Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks, has continued to make headlines since the start of the year. While this trend may seem like another attempt to tokenize everything, it is reshaping how people scale, operate, and build physical networks.
They represent a change in how we approach decentralisation and convert real-world physical networks into new investment opportunities in industries such as energy, real estate, communications, etc.
What’s DePIN
Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks are blockchain-based systems that coordinate, scale, and reward the deployment of real-world assets or infrastructure, such as phones, routers, and energy networks.
These networks operate on the principle of a sharing economy, where individuals in the network contribute tangible resources for consumers in exchange for rewards in the form of cryptocurrency.
This model offers some merits over centralized infrastructure. These include resilience against single points of failure, greater scalability to meet fluctuating demand, blockchain-powered transparency, and reduced cost since the network is distributed.
Key Features of DePIN
Three critical components make up the network:
Decentralized
At the centre of the whole network is a blockchain-based infrastructure that allows anyone to access it. Infrastructures fail because of a lack of funding, management, tools, and oversight. Decentralization changes that by putting users and resource contributors to task and their wallets on the line.
Automation
Smart contracts help manage interactions throughout the networks. Other software manages the infrastructure, from switches to integrity monitoring.
Deployment and integration
Since DePIN is a sharing economy, physical assets are deployed all over the network to be integrated. From wired networks to air spaces, infrastructures across borders are part of a giant network.
DePIN Ecosystem
Messari categorized the ecosystem into two categories:
The Physical Networks
These resource networks manage, scale, and optimize physical infrastructure. They rely on blockchain to enhance efficiency and reliability and reduce barriers to entry to essential services in communication, wireless, transportation, and energy networks.
Subtypes may include:
- Geospatial networks: for collection, verification, and management of spatial data. Hivemapper collects and utilizes crowdsourced map data from dashcams worldwide to update maps.
- Wireless networks: These networks provide connectivity over an array of devices spread around the world. Helium uses a peer-to-peer network of hotspots to offer network coverage and reward contributors with crypto.
- Energy networks: This includes decentralized networks to enhance energy distribution and consumption. Plural Energy creates an energy marketplace where users can trade energy efficiently and transparently.
- Airspaces: This network utilizes lands, real estate, properties, and the airspace above them to create a marketplace for trading, renting, and selling air rights. SkyTrade uses a marketplace to manage, trade, and optimize air rights.
Digital Resource Networks
Digital Resource networks are decentralized platforms that manage digital resources like storage, computing power, and bandwidth.
- Bandwidth: The Theta network allows users to share bandwidth in a decentralized manner. This reduces bandwidth costs and optimizes video downloads, uploads, and streaming.
- Compute networks: provide computing resources to access distributed GPUs and other essential computing resources to run power-intensive applications. Akash and Render render these services to reduce reliance on centralized cloud providers.
Top Projects to Watch in 2025
- Connectivity:
This category includes projects aiming to decentralize wireless and internet connectivity.
Helium is a decentralized wireless network built on the Solana blockchain that connects IoT devices. Utilizing a network of community-hosted hotspots, the platform allows individuals to earn HNT tokens by providing LoRaWAN and 5G coverage.
The network incentivizes hotspot owners to provide network coverage to IoT devices and mobiles. At its core is a consensus mechanism called Proof-of-Coverage, which rewards participants for verifying wireless network coverage.
Participants earn HNT tokens, the native token of the Helium ecosystem. The platform’s emphasis on real-world wireless connectivity and its innovative multi-token system has begun to show in its deployment of 5G across Europe, North America, and parts of Asia.
Developed by the Wynd Network, Grass rewards users for contributing their unused network resources by adding their internet-connected devices to the network.
It allows participants to sell their idle or unused Internet bandwidth to vetted companies. Companies utilize unused bandwidth in scraping to compare prices or verify ad displays across different regions.
2. Storage:
This category features projects focused on providing decentralized data storage solutions.
This decentralized data storage network provides permanent and distributed data storage solutions, reducing the cost of permanent storage.
Built on the Arweave Permaweb web protocol, the ecosystem includes two main components:
- Arweave blockchain is a secured network of miners that provides permanent storage or rewards in AR tokens based on a sustainable endowment.
- Gateways: they enable web browsers to access data.
The $AR token is the ecosystem’s native crypto. It compensates for enabling permanent, immutable storage.
Considered as one of the earliest DePIN projects and a pioneer of Decentralized Storage Networks (DSN), Filecoin offers a decentralized storage solution that allows users on the network to rent out idle storage space. This reduces reliance on centralized cloud providers and ensures data redundancy and security.
At the core are the Proof of Replication (PoRep) and Proof of Spacetime (PoSt) consensuses. These consensus mechanisms ensure that data is stored securely and immutably, making data storage less costly and cheating computationally expensive.
Miners on the network can earn the $FIL token by storing client data for a long period of time. The more files stored and the longer they do it, the more they earn.
3. Compute:
Projects focused on decentralizing computational resources.
As the name suggests, the Render ecosystem allows distributing complex workloads or GPU-intensive tasks like 3D graphics, video rendering, and AI model inference across a network of network-deployed community-contributed GPUs.
Users with idle GPU power can rent it out to earn rewards in $RNDR, where the network is optimized and uses GPU power on the blockchain.
The platform was initially built on the Ethereum chain but has since moved to the Solana blockchain to take advantage of its low gas fees and high transaction throughput.
The point of Render is to provide a faster and more cost-efficient or effective way of completing rendering tasks. This is quite helpful for smaller companies and independent creators who can’t afford to purchase and manage huge GPU infrastructures.
This is an alternative to centralized platforms like Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, and Google Cloud Platform. While centralized services provide computational resources to run programs on the cloud, Akash allows personal servers, data centers, and idle computational resources to participate in deploying on their marketplace.
Built on the Cosmos SDK blockchain, the marketplace uses smart contracts to facilitate computing, governance, and staking processes.
The Akash Supercloud addresses inadequacies in centralized systems by providing permissionless and transparent access to compute resources.
4. Mapping & Geospatial Data
Creating decentralized mapping solutions and geospatial data networks.
Hivemapper ($HONEY)
Hivemapper is a geospatial network that focuses on tokenizing spatial data to create an open market for maps. It’s a crowdsourcing map data platform that generates data from dashcams and updates maps dynamically through a community-driven source.
Since it’s real-time and decentralized, it offers a better alternative to Google Maps or Wave. Users can access high-quality geospatial analytics, maps, and APIs.
Users who provide street-level imagery and help improve the maps earn $HONEY, which they can use later to access Hivemapper services.
5. Commerce Enablement:
These projects provide essential infrastructure or protocols that facilitate commerce within the DePIN ecosystem.
Theta enables decentralized video and media content delivery through its native Content Delivery Network (CDN), which fetches and delivers content faster than traditional models.
Built on Ethereum on a dual-network architecture — the Edge Network and the Theta blockchain — this decentralized content delivery platform is designed to handle the high bandwidth requirements of video, pictures, and web pages. It rewards end-users for sharing their storage and bandwidth on any PC, mobile, smart TV, or IoT device.
While the Edge network stores and delivers media assets like images and videos, the Theta chain focuses on providing rewards, smart contracts, and facilitating payments.
This is a permissionless and decentralised indexing protocol. It functions as a data querying and indexing protocol for organizing blockchain data. The platform tokenizes on-chain data so that participants can curate and index data and sell it on the on-chain market based on the $GRT token.
It allows applications to use GraphQL to query APIs called subgraphs. The network consists of Indexers, Curators, and Delegators that provide services and data to Web3 applications.
Conclusion
As demand for DePIN market grows, the enablement of physical hardware infrastructure in different sectors also expands. The tech improves privacy, reduces overhead costs, cuts infrastructure prices, and eliminates single points of failure.
Which projects should you watch out for? That’s a hard question. Each offers different use cases and is focused on varying infrastructure problems. Their ability to withstand the test of time and individual effectiveness will testify to how they fulfil future demands.