This article is from Compound, written by Knower and Smac
Release date: September 12, 2024
Original link: https://www.compound.vc/writing/depin
Editors Note
Why is this research report worth reading?
DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network) explores how to use decentralized technology to build and manage physical facilities in the real world, which may subvert many traditional industries. Understanding DePIN is crucial to grasping the future development of Web3.
From macro to micro, this article systematically divides DePIN into six subcategories, covering core areas such as telecommunications, energy, computing power, decentralized AI, data and services, and outlines a complete ecological map for readers. In each field, there are real operating data of leading projects, revealing the project scale, user growth and business model.
This article does not blindly promote the bright prospects of DePIN, but clearly points out the severe challenges currently faced by the DePIN project, especially the imperfect status quo, such as the sustainability of the token economic model, the practical obstacles to competing with centralized giants, and the potential impact of future technologies (such as 6G, photonic computing, and distributed training). This balanced perspective helps readers evaluate the field more rationally.
In order to help you understand the key points of the article more quickly, we have summarized this research report.
In addition, DePINone Labs has fully translated and organized it, and highlighted its key content to facilitate everyones collection and sharing.
TL;DR
This report explores in depth 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, and achieve higher resource utilization, transparency and flexible ownership. The article points out that the real disruption lies in solving the pain points of the high-cost and low-efficiency centralized model, rather than simply decentralizing.
The report divides the DePIN field into six subcategories:
Telecom Connectivity: From DeWi to fixed wireless and public WiFi, we focus on analyzing the technical paths and market positioning of projects such as 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 such as Daylight, SCRFUL, Plural Energy, Glow, StarPower, Power Ledger, etc.
Compute, Storage Bandwidth: Explore the performance and differences of decentralized computing markets such as Akash, Fluence, IONet, Hyperbolic, Render, Livepeer, and storage networks such as Jackal, Arweave, and Filecoin.
Decentralized AI: Lists projects such as Prime Intellect, Bittensor, Gensyn, Prodia, Ritual, Grass, etc., and analyzes the prospects of combining decentralized training, verification and data layers.
Data Capture Management: Emphasizes the market value and monetization challenges of content distribution, mapping, positioning, and climate/weather data.
Services: Showcase innovative use cases such as Dimo, PuffPaw, Heale, Silencio, Blackbird, Shaga, etc. that leverage crypto incentives to drive real-world behavior.
Although DePIN has shown great potential and is considered one of the most valuable long-term sustainable investments in the crypto space, it is still in its early stages of development and faces many imperfect real challenges, such as token economic model problems, real demand and adoption, supply and demand imbalances, competition and regulation, etc.
Despite the challenges, the report is optimistic about DePIN’s future (“a bright future”), believing that it has great long-term potential.
The key to future development lies in solving the sustainability problem of the token economy, truly focusing on solving meaningful real-world problems, and possibly finding breakthroughs in innovative areas such as environmental monitoring, biological data, and personal data sharing (such as bioacoustics, eDNA, and sleep/dream data mentioned in the report), pointing the way for subsequent innovation.
To learn more about DePIN’s technical architecture and evolution path, please explore the full analysis 👇
