hat is a DePIN track? What are the prospects for the future? A comprehensive interpretation of the development of the DePIN industry

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

Unlike storage and general-purpose computing, the strong developer demand for accelerated computing means that miners in GPU DePIN projects spend most of their time working on real-world 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 least valued on a revenue multiple.

Content delivery networks (CDNs) are the new trend: we expect more than 20 decentralized CDN projects to launch 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 is going to be fierce and is already in full swing.

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

Advances in privacy-preserving computing have made 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 poised to power the next generation of breakthrough DePIN applications.

The DePIN project is uniquely positioned for large-scale data collection: to be the eyes and ears of artificial intelligence.

As the growth of compute-scale gains begins to slow, AI researchers turn 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 Hivemapper and Geodnet's investor token allocations begin to unlock in 2024.

Building a sensor network is not an 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 defensive nature.

Cameras are the most powerful and versatile sensors...... But it is also the most complicated.

Cameras are the king of sensors: they play a key role in many emerging use cases such as robotics, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, augmented/virtual reality, and many more.

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", AI needs to understand its surroundings and its own place in it: spatial intelligence.

Spatial computing is poised 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 its explosive growth in 2025.

There is a natural synergy between sensors, spatial perception, and AI DePIN projects.

We expect to see more DePIN collaborations and native integrations in 2025, bridging the three layers of the spatial intelligence stack.

Targeting DePIN projects is narrower than cameras, and there are many trade-offs that need to be made.

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