This article is from Compound, written by Knower and Smac
Publication Date: September 12, 2024
Original Link: https://www.compound.vc/writing/depin
Editor's Note
Why is this research report worth reading?
DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks) explores how to use decentralized technology to build and manage real-world physical infrastructure, potentially disrupting many traditional industries. Understanding DePIN is crucial for grasping the future development of Web3.
The article systematically breaks down DePIN into six sub-categories from macro to micro, covering core areas such as telecommunications, energy, computing power, decentralized AI, data, and services, outlining a complete ecosystem map for readers. It also provides real operational data from leading projects in each field, revealing project scale, user growth, and business models.
The article does not blindly promote DePIN's promising future but clearly points out the severe challenges currently facing DePIN projects, especially the "imperfect present," such as the sustainability of token economic models, realistic obstacles in competing with centralized giants, and potential impacts of future technologies (like 6G, photonic computing, distributed training). This balanced perspective helps readers assess the field more rationally.
To help everyone quickly understand the article's key points, we have summarized the research report.
Additionally, DePINone Labs has provided a complete translation and highlighted its key content for easy collection and sharing.
Key Points TL;DR
This report delves into the concept, current state, challenges, and future of DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks).
DePIN aims to reshape the construction and management of traditional physical infrastructure through blockchain and decentralized incentives, achieving higher resource utilization, transparency, and ownership resilience. The article points out that true disruption lies in solving the pain points of high-cost, low-efficiency centralized models, rather than simply "decentralizing".
The report divides the DePIN field into six sub-categories:
Telecom & Connectivity: From DeWi to fixed wireless and public WiFi, focusing on the technical paths and market positioning of projects like Helium, Karrier, Really, Andrena, Althea, Dabba, and WiCrypt.
Energy: Distributed Energy Resources (DER), Virtual Power Plants (VPP), and on-chain financing platforms, covering the business models and regulatory challenges of protocols like Daylight, SCRFUL, Plural Energy, Glow, StarPower, and Power Ledger.
Compute, Storage & Bandwidth: Discussing decentralized computing markets like Akash, Fluence, IONet, Hyperbolic, Render, and Livepeer, as well as the performance and differences of storage networks like Jackal, Arweave, and Filecoin.
Decentralized AI: Listing projects such as Prime Intellect, Bittensor, Gensyn, Prodia, Ritual, and Grass, analyzing the prospects of decentralized training, verification, and data layer integration.
Data Capture & Management: Emphasizing the market value and monetization challenges of content distribution, mapping, positioning, and climate/weather data.
Services: Showcasing innovative use cases of crypto-incentivized real-world behaviors through projects like Dimo, PuffPaw, Heale, Silencio, Blackbird, and Shaga.
Although DePIN shows enormous potential and is considered one of the most long-term sustainable investment directions in the crypto field, it is currently in the early stages of development and faces many "imperfect" real-world challenges, such as token economic model problems, real demand and adoption, supply-demand imbalance, competition, and regulation.
Despite these challenges, the report remains optimistic about DePIN's future ("bright future"), believing its long-term potential is immense.
The key to future development lies in solving the sustainability of token economics, truly focusing on solving meaningful real-world problems, and potentially finding breakthroughs in innovative areas such as environmental monitoring, biological data, and personal data sharing (like bioacoustics, eDNA, sleep/dream data) mentioned in the report, pointing the way for subsequent innovations.
To deeply understand DePIN's technical architecture and evolution path, explore the complete analysis 👇
