Source: Messari; Compiler: 0xjs@金财经

Messari chief DePIN research analyst Dylan Bane and Escape Velocity Ventures co-founder Salvador Gala co-authored "The Current 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 prospects of DePIN in 2025. The report covers the macro trends of DePIN, AI x DePIN, distributed wireless network (DeWi), distributed power generation (DeGEN), computing network, sensor network, identity network, logistics network, etc.

Key Takeaways

DePIN is in its early stages of development, with 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 approximately 100x ARR.

More than 13 million devices contribute to DePIN every day.

In 2024, DePIN’s “on-chain war” accelerates, with Solana and Base taking market share from other L1s. Solana leads in network infrastructure, Base leads in consumer and market, and the dedicated DePIN L1 carves out its own native on-chain ecosystem.

Places are looking to DePIN to solve infrastructure challenges.

The DePIN unit has raised over $350 million in pre-seed, seed and Series A funding rounds.

Report Contents

1. What is DePIN?

2. What changes will happen to DePIN in 2024?

Overview, supply, demand, capital, infrastructure, artificial intelligence

3. In-depth industry insights

Wireless networks, energy, computing, sensors, identity, Logistics

1. What is DePIN?

DePIN stands for Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks. DePIN uses cryptographic incentive mechanisms to efficiently coordinate the construction and operation of critical infrastructure on the public chain.

DePIN areas include: wireless networks, energy, computing, sensors, logistics, and identity.

DePIN Timeline:

2014: First Computing Network

2017: First Wireless Network

2019: First storage network

2020: The first personalArtificial Intelligence Network

2021: The first storage network

2022: The first agent network

2023: The first energy network

< p>2024: The first AR/XR network, the first DePIN venture capital fund

DePIN empowers and inspires 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 most people’s entry into the crypto economy.

The First 500 Million Cryptocurrency Owners Win the Genetic Lottery: They’re Lucky to Buy Their First Cryptocurrency… The Next 5 Billion Cryptocurrency Owners Will Earn Their First A cryptocurrency.

Global cryptocurrency ownership (excluding stablecoins) has so far been concentrated in wealthy countries, where consumers have disposable income and a higher risk tolerance for their capital. Unlike the giant power law of global wealth distribution, human time, intellectual and physical capabilities are either evenly distributed or normally distributed.

DePIN is how artificial general intelligence (AGI) travels across time and space to create the resources it needs to thrive.

Generating a 5-second video today costs more than $0.10 in compute, power, and bandwidth... Advanced AI will demand these digital commodities on an unimaginable scale.

DePIN is the first three-phase business model capable of enabling 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 its early stages and accounts for less than 0.1% of a $1+ trillion end market.

Over the next decade, DePIN will grow 100-1000x as the network gains market share from centralized players that offer slower, less reliable and less dynamic services.

The DePIN sector has 350 tokens with a market cap of $50 billion and trades at approximately 100x ARR.

We divide DePIN into six categories based on core missions: Computing, Wireless, Sensors, Identity, Energy, and Logistics.

2. What changes will happen to DePIN in 2024?

Cryptocurrency to double in 2024; DePIN growing even faster as AI attracts global attention.

DePIN went from being a category without consensus to being widely recognized as driving the crypto economy todayOne of the most important areas, if not the only most important area.

Number of projects: From 2022 to 2024, the number of DePIN projects will grow from 650 to 1,170, a 12-fold increase.

Revenue: DePIN revenue grows 100x from $100 million to $5 billion between 2022 and 2024 (3.3x including on-chain net revenue), defying bear market criticism The author claims that “DePIN has no demand side”.

Market share: From 2022 to 2024, DePIN’s share of the cryptocurrency altcoin market capitalization increased from 16% to 49%, an increase of 25 times (DePIN excluding AI increased from 15% to 48%).

DePIN’s growth is driven by a new native platform for founders and community.

DePIN attracts some of the brightest minds in crypto.

At the second DePIN Summit in New York, leading founders and investors in the space gathered to discuss the future of community-operated 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 the friction of onboarding and acquiring new users) and heavy nodes (used to achieve stronger, 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 now have more than 1 million nodes.

As the supply side is proven, DePIN faces a new set of challenges: demand and monetization.

Founders and investors now look to revenue as the primary operating and valuation metric driving capital allocation decisions.

Twenty revenue-generating DePIN projects achieve $500 million in annualized revenue.

DePIN total revenue grew 33x in 2024 (only including on-chain net revenue growing 3.3x).

As DePIN projects turn on fees and move revenue on-chain, valuation multiples may expand by more than 10x.

The median valuation multiple of DePIN projects with on-chain revenue is more than 200 times net annual recurring revenue (ARR), while the valuation multiple of projects with off-chain revenue is less than 20 times.

Seed-stage venture capital institutions are pouring into the DePIN field., they moved forward bravely under the favorable listing environment.

In private markets, pre-seed/seed stages raise more money than Series A; in liquid markets, lower listing fully diluted valuation (FDV) is a major determinant of high returns .

A handful of VCs 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, each making more than 8 investments in 2024, and their DePIN portfolios have each raised more than 1 billion US dollars.

Most late-stage capital has gone to a handful of breakthrough DePIN projects backed by top tier venture capital institutions.

DePIN projects that successfully raise eight figures in VC funding typically issue tokens at 50-100x book value, or billions of dollars in FDV.

Some DePIN projects are skipping venture capital and instead raising 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 while conducting venture capital rounds.

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 going multi-chain to expand their user base, but this has also led to the fragmentation of liquidity.

Solana leads in network infrastructure, while Base leads in consumers and markets.

Solana’s culture focused on low latency 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 in Q4 2024Degree’s on-chain transaction activity grew more than 10x, while two emerging challengers, Peaq and Minima, launched mainnet tokens.

Some innovations such as proof of location and proof of backhaul make the DePIN project easier to scale.

Witness Chain launches the first universal Proof of Location protocol on testnet, secured by over $14 billion of 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 achieve 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 faster.

Rebundling at the hardware and software levels helps abstract complexity for users and enables deep integration into the DePIN ecosystem.

Best hardware form factors drive a “come for the tools, stay for the network” behavior.

Network effects are most powerful when nodes provide both first-party utility to individual miners and third-party utility to other users on the network.

Places are looking to DePIN to solve infrastructure challenges.

Public officials are using DePIN to advance issues important to voters and win elections, from ensuring Tanzania’s AI sovereignty to closing the digital divide in Mexico.

In 2024, the world will realize AI’s huge demand for digital goods.

With a handful of tech giants vying for control of critical artificial intelligence resources, DePIN is the rest of the world’s only hope of gaining a foothold in the race.

If you have confidence in artificial intelligence early on, then on-chain agents are the most worthy area to bet on.

Unlike public stock markets that focus on potential resources limiting the growth of AI, demand for AI tokens in 2024 preempts demand for DePIN tokens.

The toughest problem in AI is attribution: Which results are worth paying for?

How do "GPU-starved" developers (i.e. developers who rent AI infrastructure) know that a model is actually running and not a cheaper, slower, or biased model?

Bittensor made breakthrough progress in 2024, earning the title of King of Decentralized Artificial Intelligence.

While its token price fluctuates wildly, the flow of world-class artificial intelligence and crypto talent into the Bittensor ecosystem has only increased.

Bittensor-driven products include:

Autonomous agents seem to be on the verge of the 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 $5 billion in monthly trading volume in the first half of 2025 above.

Intelligent agents (robots) are already the most active users on the public chain.

Cryptocurrency users naturally understand the potential of on-chain proxies after years of competing with sandwich/MEV bots for transaction execution, sniper bots for NFT minting, and more.

Despite being ignored by AI researchers, agents are experiencing viral growth in the real world.

In the fourth quarter of 2024, more than 13,000 agents issued tokens on the Virtuals platform, most of which are simple chatbots connected to social media accounts that users can interact with.

The most interesting agents are trading new markets for information, capital, and attention.

The ability of agents to ingest information and act on it orders of magnitude faster than human traders can be used to bring liquidity to long-tail markets that would otherwise not exist.

Two key challenges facing agents: How do they interact with the world and each other?

Intelligent agents are enterprises of the 21st century, completing processes that originally took decades to complete in a few months .

3. In-depth industry insights into the wireless field

In 2024, adversaries exposed the vulnerabilities of our telecommunications and network infrastructure.

2024 was the worst year on record for hacking, disruption and fraud against telecoms infrastructure, exacerbated by the use of AI-powered deepfakes by hackers, criminals and dictators This situation.

Helium

Consumers are ready for the new: 2024 is Helium Mobile’s 0-to-1 breakthrough year.

Helium added more than 100,000 new subscribers and 300,000 indirect users this year, driving annualized on-chain net revenue into seven figures across its two distinct lines of business.

Helium has achieved something that few communities in the crypto space have been able to do: remain unwaveringly focused on what matters.

Helium made the difficult decision to end its CBRS and multi-token experiments, ultimately paving the way for the rapid acceleration of its cellular Wi-Fi offload business.

With a few more years of growth, HeliumWill 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 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 sustain that growth rate for decades to come.

At the growth rate of Q4 2024, Helium's investors are paying for its 5-year expected growth to 500,000 users.

For those investors who believe that user growth will re-accelerate back to Q2 2024 levels, HNT (Helium Token) at current prices looks like over a 5 year time span A mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), but 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 host-neutral 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) GB).

A software-driven approach to DeWi can scale faster than physical devices.

Software-based DePIN projects tend to have lower profit margins than their hardware-based counterparts, but can scale faster and with less capital investment.

Energy field

Distributed energy is a key coordination challenge that needs to be solved urgently for mankind.one.

If fundamental problems in the electric grid are not addressed, per capita energy consumption will stagnate, hampering technological and economic progress.

Daylight

Daylight creates a decentralized energy flywheel through a decentralized incentive mechanism.

Daylight scales distributed energy resources 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 of the energy value chain.

GRID is the settlement and consensus layer for physical and financial distributed energy markets, using staking and burning mechanisms to support a currency with a total addressable market (TAM) of $1 trillion per year in the United States.

Glow

Glow inspires 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 on the verge of becoming independently profitable.

Glow’s growth in 2024 has been outstanding… even outpacing Bitcoin’s growth early on.

The energy DePIN project is able to generate considerable 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 meaningfully contribute to on-chain economic activity from day one ($20,000+ 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 that incentivizes the construction of renewable energy generation and/or storage.

DeGEN even coordinates electric cars (i.e. the batteries on the car) through an on-chain incentive mechanism.

Users want continued, reliable, and transparent access to EV charging stations before ditching their gas-powered cars... But so far, Web2 EV charging station shareholders have suffered.

Computing Domain

Computing is the most mature, valuable and competitive category in DePIN.

In the private market, the GPU-focused DePIN project has received twice as much funding as its storage-focused peers, and in the liquid market, its valuation is also twice that of storage networks.

GPU networks enjoy a premium due to their structurally high utilization.

Unlike storage and general-purpose computing, developers' strong demand for accelerated computing means that miners on the GPU DePIN project spend most of their time processing real workloads.

SpearUnsurprisingly, 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 on a revenue multiple basis.

Content delivery networks (CDNs) are the new trend: we expect more than 20 decentralized CDN projects to be launched in 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 competition for content delivery network (CDN) capacity will be fierce and has already begun.

In 2024, browser extensions driven by referral programs and points/airdrop programs are the largest channels for DePIN node growth, with more than 15 projects launching browser extensions.

Advances in privacy computing enable 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) will surely power the next generation of breakthrough DePIN applications. .

Sensors

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 returns begin to slow, AI researchers are turning their attention to data bottlenecks to drive continued improvement in model performance.

The Sensor DePIN project generated $1.7 million in revenue in 2024 (up 500% year over year), with 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 sensor networks is no easy task: the data stack is deep.

Investors underestimate the difficulty of building a global, decentralized real-time data collection network, but also underestimate 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, and more.

The Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/XR) DePIN project is creating 3D spatial maps for robots, agents and humans to facilitate collaboration.

When the user wantsWhen asking AI to perform tasks for them in the “real world,” AI needs to understand its surroundings and its place within it: spatial intelligence.

Spatial computing is expected to be DePIN’s breakout trend in 2025.

The convergence of consumer AR/VR hardware, powerful AI models for 3D asset creation, and on-chain cryptographic incentives will drive explosive growth in 2025.

There are natural synergies 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 positioning DePIN projects are narrower than that of cameras, and require more trade-offs.

Positioning networks can drive trillions of dollars in downstream value to customers, but they compete fiercely with each other and with visual positioning systems.

The Sensor DePIN project is tracking real-time conditions at every level of the Earth.

Real-time environmental data, previously only available to governments, militaries, and hedge funds, is now being released by open, verifiable sensor networks.

Back on Earth, DePIN wearables are enabling health-focused communities to emerge on-chain.

As healthcare becomes hyper-personalized, data from verifiable sensors becomes the backbone of leveraging artificial intelligence to disrupt the healthcare and health insurance industries.

Smartphones provide a wealth of health data with lower user friction than hardware.

The DePIN project draws inspiration from useful fitness apps with proven product-market fit and enhances user engagement by adding token incentives.

Identity

Authentication is the core issue limiting the most promising applications of cryptocurrencies.

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 verifiable human identity.

Despite being banned in several major markets, World (formerly Worldcoin) has over 20 million verified identities in its first 18 months and has over $20 billion in total Dilutive valuation.

Worldcoin’s success has driven innovation in competitive proof-of-personhood protocols.

The personality proof solutions overlap in the two groupsCompete on trade-offs: scanning accuracy versus cost, and identifier persistence versus privacy.

Anymal

Humans are not the only ones in need of digital identities: Anymal tracks more than 1.5 million pets on-chain.

By working directly with animal shelters and rescue organizations, Petastic (the first app on the Anymal protocol) has established digital identities for millions of pets ahead of its public launch.

Dimo

Dimo’s decentralized automotive ecosystem connects 135,000 vehicles with 100 Multiple developers are connected.

Dimo’s ecosystem saw meaningful growth in supply-side scale and developer activity in 2024, while its on-chain revenue ended the year roughly flat at around $10,000 annualized revenue ( ARR).

Blackbird

Decentralized loyalty and rewards network 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 at partner restaurants more than 75,000 times in its first nine months.

Logistics DePIN

Logistics DePIN projects move people and/or items from one location to another.

Logistics is the most emerging category in DePIN, with entrepreneurs experimenting with on-chain incentives in every corner of the $5 trillion+ global logistics industry.

Logistics and finance are already intertwined: DePIN drives financialization even further.

Over the past decade, digitalization has driven value enhancement in logistics supply chains from infrastructure to capital as software platforms embed native financial products.

The Logistics DePIN project uses open hardware and software to track shipments more efficiently than Web2.

The DePIN project utilizes encrypted verification data from physical sensors and third-party software platforms to leverage on-chain capital to insure real-world activities.

The trilateral network is the largest and most defensible opportunity in logistics.

Trilateral networks tend to dominate in the world’s largest markets, where on-chain capital can be used to provide better financing for launching 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 on its 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 independent of the nature of the economic activity on the protocol and will therefore eventually be extended to every locally provided service.

3DOS

3DOS is building the missing pillar of e-commerce: on-demand manufacturing.

3DOS leverages the spare capacity of a network of over 75,000 connected 3D printers to enable any creator, brand or business to sell custom physical products to their audience.

The future of e-commerce is hyper-personalization enabled by 3D printing.

3D printers have improved by orders of magnitude in cost, speed, and quality, and are now capable of producing high-quality, customized consumer and industrial products on demand.

Heale

Heale’s logistics network connects the extremely fragmented freight industry.

With a combined annual revenue of $1 trillion, the U.S. trucking industry has a huge need for verifiable data that can make aggregation and settlement processes more efficient.

Dtravel

Dtravel facilitates short-term rentals between strangers around the world.

Dtravel’s tokenized protocol gives hosts end-to-end control over their listings, regardless of which platform consumers use to book.

Teleport

Teleport is disrupting the ride-sharing industry, starting in Austin, Texas.

With ride-sharing platforms like Uber charging up to 45% off fares, passengers and drivers alike are hungry for ride-sharing networks that put their interests first.

There are still several untapped multi-billion dollar DePIN opportunities in logistics.

Looking for inspiration from Web2 startups, there is a need for new logistics networks driven by new use cases such as luggage storage and short-term staffing.

DePIN is an inevitable global movement.