Decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePins) are among the top-performing sectors in the crypto industry in 2024. They have the potential to disrupt industries and long-standing methods of organization underpinning modern society.
Brian Trunzo, head of global business development at Polygon Labs, recently provided Cointelegraph with expert insight on the current state and future potential of DePin technology.
Trunzo explained that the industry constantly strives for product-market fit but has rarely achieved it. According to the Polygon executive, DePin is one area that shows excellent product-market fit:
"This idea that you can just distribute physical infrastructure, reward folks for their contributions to the network, for providing security, or for doing work on the network to reward them with a digital asset. It has a real, tangible use case that gets people excited."
Self-ownership of data is a key use case for DePin, Trunzo noted, while giving the example of a DePin that he uses called DIMO, a decentralized project that rewards users for sharing their vehicle data with the network.
DePin's role in molding and securing the future
The Polygon executive explained that providing data provenance services will also play an increasingly important role in decentralized physical infrastructure networks. This importance will grow as artificial intelligence becomes more powerful and cyberspace is filled with more automated agents.
Related: Hashing It Out: The era of decentralized physical infrastructure networks
Trunzo also predicted a potential disruption of cloud services by decentralized physical infrastructure networks, challenging the dominance of Amazon Web Services and other industry incumbents.
“The idea of dismantling the AWS, GCP duopoly is amazing to think of [especially considering] the downstream effects, considering how important the AWS and GCP business units are to Amazon and Google.”
This disruption “represents such a big opportunity," Trunzo said, citing examples of projects like Filecoin and Arweave, which are both competing to provide decentralized data storage solutions for the Web3 ecosystem.
Building an anti-fragile ecosystem
Toward the end of the conversation, the Polygon Labs executive stressed the “existential” need for the Web3 ecosystem to fully decentralize and move away from centralized infrastructure providers.
"If we’re meant to be antifragile, you can’t have fragile single points of failure," Trunzo remarked, a poignant reminder to the nascent Web 3 industry.
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