Source: Messari; Compiled by: 0xjs@Golden Finance
Messari's Chief DePIN Research Analyst Dylan Bane and Escape Velocity Ventures co-founder Salvador Gala co-authored (The State of DePIN in 2024). This 104-page report provides an in-depth analysis and review of the DePIN industry in 2024, and a forward-looking outlook on the development of DePIN in 2025. The report covers macro trends in DePIN, AI x DePIN, distributed wireless networks (DeWi), distributed power generation (DeGEN), computing networks, sensor networks, identity networks, logistics networks, etc.
Key Takeaways
DePIN is in its early stages of development and has less than 0.1% share of the $1+ trillion end market.
The DePIN sector has 350 tokens with a market cap of $50 billion and trades at about 100x ARR.
More than 13 million devices contribute to DePIN every day.
In 2024, the DePIN "chain war" accelerates, with Solana and Base taking market share from other L1s. Solana leads in network infrastructure, Base leads in consumers and markets, and dedicated DePIN L1s open up their own native on-chain ecosystems.
Local governments are looking to DePIN to solve infrastructure challenges.
The DePIN unit has raised more than $350 million in pre-seed, seed and Series A rounds.
Report Contents
1. What is DePIN?
2. What changes will DePIN have in 2024?
Overview, Supply, Demand, Capital, Infrastructure, Artificial Intelligence
3. Industry Insights
Wireless networks, energy, computing, sensors, identity, logistics
1. What is DePIN?
DePIN stands for Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks. DePIN uses cryptographic incentives to efficiently coordinate the construction and operation of key infrastructure on the public chain.
DePIN areas include: wireless networks, energy, computing, sensors, logistics, and identity.
DePIN Timeline:
2014: The first computing network
2017: First wireless network
2019: The first storage network
2020: The first AI network
2021: The first storage network
2022: First Agent Network
2023: The first energy network
2024: First AR/XR network, first DePIN venture capital fund
DePIN empowers and incentivizes people to improve the public infrastructure around them.
In a world filled with untrustworthy institutions and incompetent bureaucrats, DePIN returns wealth and power to citizens and communities.
DePIN is the gateway for most people to enter the crypto economy.
The first 500 million cryptocurrency owners won the genetic lottery: they were lucky enough to buy their first cryptocurrency… The next 5 billion cryptocurrency owners will work hard to earn their first cryptocurrency.
Global cryptocurrency ownership (excluding stablecoins) has so far been concentrated in wealthy countries, where consumers have disposable income and a high risk tolerance for their capital. Unlike the great power law of global wealth distribution, human time, intellectual and physical capacities are either evenly distributed or normally distributed.
DePIN is how artificial general intelligence (AGI) can travel through time and space to create the resources it needs to thrive.
Generating a 5-second video today costs over $0.10 in compute, electricity, and bandwidth… Advanced AI will demand these digital commodities at an unimaginable scale.
DePIN is the first three-phase business model capable of spawning a $10 trillion+ network.
The DePIN flywheel combines the economies of scale of traditional infrastructure (1), the network effects of technology platforms (2), and the liquidity moat of currency (3).
DePIN is in the early stages and has less than 0.1% share of the $1+ trillion end market.
Over the next decade, DePIN will grow 100-1000x as the network wins market share from centralized players that offer slower, less reliable, and less dynamic service.
The DePIN sector has 350 tokens with a market cap of $50 billion and trades at about 100x ARR.
Based on the core tasks, we classify DePIN into six categories: computing, wireless, sensor, identity, energy, and logistics.
2. What changes will DePIN have in 2024?
Cryptocurrency to double by 2024; DePIN to grow even faster as AI captures global attention.
DePIN has moved from a category without consensus to being widely recognized as one of the most important areas, if not the single most important area, driving the crypto economy today.
Number of projects: From 2022 to 2024, the number of DePIN projects increased 12-fold from 650 to 1,170.
Revenue: DePIN revenue grows 100x from $100M to $5B between 2022 and 2024 (3.3x including on-chain net revenue), disproving the bear market critics’ claim that “DePIN has no demand side.”
Market Share: DePIN’s share of the cryptocurrency altcoin market capitalization grows 25x from 16% to 49% between 2022 and 2024 (DePIN excluding AI grows from 15% to 48%).
DePIN’s growth is driven by a new native platform built for founders and the community.
DePIN has attracted some of the brightest minds in crypto.
At the second annual DePIN Summit in New York, leading founders and investors in the space came together to discuss the future of community-run infrastructure networks.
Expanding the supply side is no longer a problem: a clear growth strategy has emerged.
Most DePIN projects combine light nodes (used to reduce friction for new users to join and acquire new users) and heavy nodes (used to achieve stronger and more reliable network performance).
More than 13 million devices around the world contribute to DePIN every day.
In 2024, 20 DePIN projects have grown to more than 100,000 active nodes, and 5 of them have now exceeded 1 million nodes.
With the supply side validated, DePIN faces a new set of challenges: demand and monetization.
Founders and investors now use revenue as the primary operating and valuation metric driving capital allocation decisions.
20 revenue-generating DePIN projects achieved annualized revenue of $500 million.
DePIN’s total revenue grew 33x in 2024 (including only on-chain net revenue which grew 3.3x).
As the DePIN project turns on the fee switch and moves revenue on-chain, the valuation multiple could expand by more than 10x.
The median valuation of DePIN projects with on-chain revenue is over 200x net annual recurring revenue (ARR), while projects with off-chain revenue have a valuation multiple of less than 20x.
Seed-stage venture capital firms have flocked to the DePIN space, and they are moving forward courageously in a favorable listing environment.
In the private market, more money is raised at the pre-seed/seed stage than at Series A; in liquid markets, lower fully diluted valuations (FDVs) at listing are the primary determinant of superior returns.
A handful of venture capital firms with clear themes are focusing their bets on the largest DePIN market.
Multicoin, Framework, a16z Crypto and EV3 are among the most confident backers of the DePIN project, making more than 8 investments each in 2024, and their DePIN portfolios have each raised more than $100 million.
Most late-stage capital flows to a handful of breakthrough DePIN projects backed by top VCs.
DePIN projects that successfully raise eight-figure VC funding typically issue tokens at 50-100x book value, or billions of dollars in FDV.
Some DePIN projects skipped venture capital and instead raised money from crypto hedge funds.
Crypto hedge funds including EV3 Liquids, Modular, Pantera, and Borderless are providing growth capital and post-investment support to the DePIN project following the project’s Token Generation Event (TGE).
The DePIN project is raising funds directly from its community in parallel to its venture capital round.
In 2024, the DePIN project raised more than $230 million from the community through node sales, crowdfunding platforms, and protocol-owned liquidity pools.
DePIN’s “public chain war” accelerates, with Solana and Base taking market share from other Layer 1 blockchains.
With the support of interoperability solutions Wormhole and Layer Zero, many DePIN projects are moving towards multi-chain to expand their user base, but this also leads to the fragmentation of liquidity.
Solana leads in network infrastructure, while Base has the edge in consumers and markets.
Solana’s low-latency-focused culture attracts innovators at the infrastructure layer, while Coinbase’s brand and retail distribution channels attract consumer-focused founders to Base.
The Layer 1 blockchain built specifically for DePIN is building its own native on-chain ecosystem.
The most mature DePIN Layer 1 ecosystem, IoTeX, saw its on-chain transaction activity grow more than 10x in Q4 2024, while two emerging challengers, Peaq and Minima, launched their mainnet tokens.
Innovations such as Proof of Location and Proof of Backhaul make the DePIN project more scalable.
Witness Chain launched the first generalized Proof of Position protocol on testnet, secured by over $14 billion in ETH re-staked by Eigenlayer.
DePIN sensors are cheaper, more diverse, and more powerful than in the past.
Now that the DePIN project has a strategy to reach more than 10,000 active nodes, contract manufacturers are willing to work with the founders to develop custom hardware.
Modularity is no longer a pipe dream: DePIN projects are helping each other to scale up faster.
Re-bundling at the hardware and software level helps abstract complexity for users and enables deep integration of the DePIN ecosystem.
Best-in-class hardware form factors drive “come for the tools, stay for the network” behavior.
Network effects are strongest when nodes provide both first-party utility to individual miners and third-party utility to other users on the network.
Local governments are looking to DePIN to solve infrastructure challenges.
Public officials are using DePIN to advance issues important to voters and win elections, from ensuring AI sovereignty in Tanzania to closing the digital divide in Mexico.
In 2024, the world realizes the huge demand for digital goods from AI.
As a handful of tech giants compete for control of key AI resources, DePIN is the only hope for the rest of the world to gain a leg up in the race.
If you believe in AI early on, on-chain agents are the best area to bet on.
Unlike the public stock markets which focus on potential resources limiting the growth of AI, the demand for AI tokens in 2024 preempts the demand for DePIN tokens.
The toughest problem in AI is attribution: Which results are worth paying for?
How do “GPU-starved” developers (i.e., those renting AI infrastructure) know that a model is actually working, and not a cheaper, slower, or biased model?
Bittensor achieved a breakthrough in 2024 and earned the title of the king of decentralized artificial intelligence.
While its token price fluctuates wildly, the influx of world-class AI and crypto talent into the Bittensor ecosystem has only increased.
Bittensor-powered products include:
Autonomous agents appear to be on the brink of a Cambrian explosion.
The early growth of agents is similar to the rise of DeFi and NFTs in 2020-2021; if this trend continues, we may see agents reach monthly transaction volume of more than $5 billion in the first half of 2025.
Intelligent agents (robots) are already the most active users on public chains.
Crypto users naturally understand the potential of on-chain proxies after years of competing with sandwich/MEV bots for trade execution, sniper bots for NFT minting, and more.
Despite being ignored by AI researchers, intelligent agents are showing viral growth in the real world.
In the fourth quarter of 2024, more than 13,000 agents had issued tokens on the Virtuals platform, most of which were simple chatbots connected to social media accounts with which users could interact.
The most interesting agents are trading in new markets for information, capital, and attention.
Intelligent agents can ingest information and act upon it orders of magnitude faster than human traders, an ability that can be used to bring liquidity to long-tail markets where otherwise none existed.
Two key challenges facing intelligent agents: How do they interact with the world and with each other?
Intelligent agents are the businesses of the 21st century, speeding through processes in a matter of months that would otherwise take decades.
3. Industry Insights
Wireless field
In 2024, adversaries have exposed the vulnerabilities of our telecommunications and cyber infrastructure.
2024 was the worst year on record for hacking, disruptions and fraud on telecommunications infrastructure, exacerbated by the use of AI-driven deepfakes by hackers, criminals and dictators.
Helium
Consumers are ready for something new: 2024 is the 0 to 1 breakthrough year for Helium Mobile.
Helium has added more than 100,000 new subscribers and 300,000 indirect users this year, driving annualized on-chain net revenues for its two different business lines into the seven figures.
Helium has achieved something that few communities in crypto have been able to do: an unwavering focus on what matters.
Helium made the difficult decision to terminate its CBRS and multi-token experiments, ultimately paving the way for a rapid acceleration of its cellular Wi-Fi offload business.
With a few more years of growth, Helium will surpass traditional mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) in scale and profitability.
Helium Mobile is the first mobile hybrid network operator (MHNO) with a growing subscriber base and a global community owned and operated network infrastructure.
The market is either pricing in Helium's future profitability or its growth... but not both.
Helium is growing an order of magnitude faster than traditional telcos, and its community-based deployment model means it can maintain that growth rate for decades to come.
At the fourth quarter of 2024 growth rate, Helium’s investors are paying for a five-year growth forecast to 500,000 users.
For investors who believe that user growth will re-accelerate back to Q2 2024 levels, HNT (Helium Token) at current prices behaves like a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) over a 5-year time horizon, but is essentially a Mobile Hybrid Network Operator (MHNO).
Dawn
Dawn is taking a solar-like approach to the $100 billion-plus home internet market.
DAWN’s testnet network covers more than 10 data centers and more than 1.5 million homes in the United States, providing high-speed wireless internet, and will expand to Africa and Latin America in 2025.
WiFI Map
WiFi Map expands from free Wi-Fi and eSIM to full-stack maps of public facilities.
WiFi Map’s community of more than 80,000 monthly active contributors has begun crowdsourcing maps of public restrooms, drinking fountains, landmarks, and other facilities around the world.
Some hardware-based DeWi projects focus on neutral host CBRS and/or Wi-Fi bands.
CBRS is an emerging wireless standard that requires high economic investment in high-traffic areas ($0.50/GB), while Wi-Fi bands, although ubiquitous, are difficult to achieve profitability ($0.05/GB).
The software-driven DeWi approach can achieve scalability faster than physical devices.
Software-based DePIN projects tend to have lower margins than their hardware-based counterparts, but can scale faster and with less capital investment.
Energy
Distributed energy is one of the key coordination challenges that humanity needs to solve.
If fundamental problems in the grid are not addressed, per capita energy consumption will stagnate, hindering technological and economic progress.
Daylight
Daylight creates a decentralized energy flywheel through a decentralized incentive mechanism.
Daylight scales distributed energy by incentivizing and coordinating the entire energy value chain, from installation to financing to coordination.
GRID is the first energy-backed currency that touches every link in the energy value chain.
GRID is the settlement and consensus layer for physical and financial distributed energy markets, backing a currency with a $1 trillion annual total addressable market (TAM) in the United States through a staking and burning mechanism.
Glow
Glow is inspiring the development of new solar plants with incredible speed and efficiency.
Glow uses carbon credits and other subsidies to accelerate the deployment of solar farms that are close to becoming independently profitable.
Glow’s growth in 2024 is outstanding…even outpacing Bitcoin’s growth early on.
The Energy DePIN project is able to generate significant on-chain revenue relative to its user base.
Given the nature of renewable energy devices, participants in the Energy DePIN project will be able to make meaningful contributions to on-chain economic activity from day one ($20k+ per household).
Other DeGEN projects are focused on markets outside the United States, where solar and peer-to-peer energy markets are more mature.
DeGEN (Decentralized Energy Network) is another name for the DePIN project to incentivize the construction of renewable energy generation and/or storage.
DeGEN even coordinates electric vehicles (i.e. the batteries on the car) through on-chain incentive mechanisms.
Users want consistent, reliable, and transparent access to EV charging stations before they ditch their gas-powered cars… but so far, Web2 EV charging station shareholders have suffered.
Computing
Computing is the most mature, valuable, and competitive category in DePIN.
In the private market, GPU-focused DePIN projects have received twice as much funding as their storage-focused peers, and in the liquidity market, their valuations are also twice that of storage networks.
GPU networks enjoy a premium due to their structurally high utilization.
Unlike storage and general computing, strong developer demand for accelerated computing means that miners in the GPU DePIN project spend most of their time processing actual workloads.
Paradoxically, the fastest growing GPU DePIN project is also the cheapest.
Of the three decentralized GPU networks with on-chain revenue, Akash is both the fastest growing and the lowest valued network on a revenue multiple basis.
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are the new trend: we expect more than 20 decentralized CDN projects to be launched by 2025.
CDN projects compete with each other to attract edge computing and bandwidth capacity to serve latency-sensitive applications such as content streaming, data scraping, and spatial computing.
The battle for content delivery network (CDN) capacity will be intense and is already underway.
In 2024, browser extensions driven by referral programs and points/airdrop programs are the largest channel for DePIN node growth, with more than 15 projects launching browser extensions.
Advances in privacy-preserving computing make possible DePIN applications that were not possible in Web2.
While scaling bottlenecks remain in the short term, privacy-focused technologies like zkTLS, multi-party computation (MPC), and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) are set to power the next generation of groundbreaking DePIN applications.
sensor
The DePIN project has a unique advantage in large-scale data collection: becoming the eyes and ears of artificial intelligence.
As gains in computing scale begin to slow, AI researchers are turning their attention to data bottlenecks to drive continued improvements in model performance.
The Sensor DePIN project generated $1.7 million in revenue in 2024 (up 500% year-over-year) and saw significant growth in the fourth quarter.
However, revenue growth does not necessarily translate into higher token prices as investor token allocations for Hivemapper and Geodnet begin to unlock in 2024.
Building a sensor network is not easy: the data stack is deep.
Investors underestimated the difficulty of building a global, decentralized, real-time data collection network, but also underestimated its defensibility.
Cameras are the most powerful and versatile sensors... but also the most complex.
Cameras are the king of sensors: they play a key role in many emerging application scenarios such as robotics, artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, augmented/virtual reality, etc.
The Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/XR) DePIN project is creating 3D spatial maps for robots, agents, and humans to facilitate collaboration.
When users ask AI to perform tasks for them in the “real world,” the AI needs to understand its surroundings and its place in it: spatial intelligence.
Spatial computing is expected to be a breakthrough trend for DePIN in 2025.
The convergence of consumer-grade AR/VR hardware, powerful AI models for 3D asset creation, and on-chain crypto incentives will drive explosive growth in 2025.
There is a natural synergy between sensors, spatial perception and artificial intelligence DePIN projects.
We expect to see more DePIN collaborations and native integrations in 2025, connecting the three layers of the spatial intelligence stack.
The application scenarios of the positioning DePIN project are narrower than those of cameras and require trade-offs in more aspects.
Positioning networks can deliver trillions of dollars in downstream value to customers, but they compete fiercely with each other and with vision positioning systems.
The sensor DePIN project is tracking real-time conditions at every level of the Earth.
Real-time environmental data, previously available only to governments, militaries, and hedge funds, is now being published by open, verifiable sensor networks.
Back on Earth, DePIN wearables are enabling health-focused communities to emerge on-chain.
As healthcare becomes highly personalized, data from verifiable sensors is the backbone for disrupting the healthcare and health insurance industries using artificial intelligence.
Smartphones provide a wealth of health data, and the friction for users to join is lower than that of hardware.
The DePIN project draws inspiration from practical fitness apps with proven product-market fit and enhances user engagement by adding token incentives.
identity
Identity verification is a core issue that limits cryptocurrency’s most promising applications.
The growth of the India stack demonstrates that a trusted, neutral digital identity layer is a prerequisite for mass adoption of digital payments and other real-world applications.
This cycle's "Samcoin" Worldcoin is the undisputed leader in the field of verifiable human identity.
Despite being banned in several major countries, World (formerly Worldcoin) had over 20 million verified identities within its first 18 months and boasts a fully diluted valuation of over $20 billion.
The success of Worldcoin has spurred innovation in competing proof-of-personality protocols.
Proof-of-personality solutions compete in two sets of overlapping trade-offs: scanning accuracy versus cost, and identifier persistence versus privacy.
Anymal
Humans aren’t the only ones in need of digital identities: Anymal tracks over 1.5 million pets on-chain.
By working directly with animal shelters and rescue organizations, Petastic (the first application built on the Anymal protocol) has already established digital identities for millions of pets before launching publicly.
Dimo
Dimo's decentralized automotive ecosystem connects 135,000 cars with over 100 developers.
In 2024, Dimo’s ecosystem achieves meaningful growth in supply-side scale and developer activity, while its on-chain revenue remains roughly flat at the end of the year at approximately $10,000 in annualized revenue (ARR).
Blackbird
A decentralized loyalty and rewards network that creates value through “vertical identities”.
Blackbird, co-founded by Resy founder Ben Leventhal, raised $35 million from a16z, Multicoin, and USV, and saw users check in more than 75,000 times at partner restaurants in its first nine months.
Logistics DePIN
Logistics DePIN items move people and/or goods from one location to another.
Logistics is the most emerging category in DePIN, with entrepreneurs experimenting with on-chain incentives in various corners of the $5 trillion+ global logistics industry.
Logistics and finance are already intertwined: DePIN furthers financialization.
Over the past decade, digitalization has driven value additions to the logistics supply chain from infrastructure to capital as software platforms have embedded native financial products.
The Logistics DePIN project uses open hardware and software to track shipments more efficiently than Web2.
The DePIN project leverages cryptographically verified data from physical sensors and third-party software platforms to provide insurance for real-world activities using on-chain capital.
Trilateral networks are the largest and most defensible opportunity in logistics.
Three-sided networks tend to dominate in the world’s largest markets, where on-chain capital can be used to better finance startup market activity.
Nosh
Nosh's decentralized food delivery network puts local communities in the driver's seat.
By empowering local restaurants to recruit their own drivers, Nosh has the potential to increase profit margins in the food delivery business from $0.50 to $5.00 per order.
Nosh is powered by LOCAL, the first fully generalizable DePIN consensus protocol.
Similar to Google’s PageRank algorithm, LOCAL is agnostic to the nature of economic activity on the protocol and will therefore eventually scale to every locally provided service.
3DOS
3DOS is building the missing pillar of e-commerce: on-demand manufacturing.
3DOS leverages the idle capacity of a network of over 75,000 connected 3D printers to enable any creator, brand or business to sell customized physical products to their audience.
The future of e-commerce is hyper-personalization enabled by 3D printing.
3D printers have increased in cost, speed, and quality by orders of magnitude, and are now capable of producing high-quality, customized consumer and industrial products on demand.
Good
Heale's logistics network connects the extremely fragmented freight industry.
The U.S. trucking industry, which generates $1 trillion in revenue annually, has a huge need for verifiable data that can make the aggregation and settlement processes more efficient.
Dtravel
Dtravel facilitates short-term rentals between strangers around the world.
Dtravel’s tokenized protocol enables hosts to have end-to-end control over their listings, regardless of which platform the consumer uses to make the booking.
Teleport
Teleport is disrupting the ride-sharing industry, starting in Austin, Texas.
With ride-sharing platforms like Uber taking up to 45% of fares, passengers and drivers alike are eager for ride-sharing networks that put their interests first.
There are still several untapped multi-billion dollar DePIN opportunities in the logistics sector.
Taking inspiration from Web2 startups, there is a demand for new logistics networks driven by new use cases such as luggage storage and short-term staffing.
DePIN is an inevitable global movement.
