The Real World: How DePIN Bridges Crypto Back to Physical Systems

Blockchain technology has the potential to direct capital more efficiently toward critical physical infrastructure projects than traditional methods. These projects, known as Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePINs), encompass wireless connectivity platforms, AI-related resources like computing power and data, and various other applications.

DePIN assets provide a real-world, non-speculative application of crypto adoption, utilizing tokens as economic incentives to facilitate the sharing of resources across networks.

Currently, Solana leads as the primary blockchain for DePINs, hosting some of the top DePIN projects by market capitalization, usage, and adoption, including Helium, Render, and Grass. Solana’s appeal as the preferred blockchain for DePINs stems from its speed, cost-effectiveness, and reliability.

AI-related DePINs dominate the sector, accounting for 48% of the market capitalization. These projects specialize in decentralized AI model training, computing resources, data scraping, and storage. Grayscale Research finds the emerging use case of decentralized model training particularly compelling.

Solana has recently gained mainstream media attention due to the launch of memecoins by President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump in January. While it currently dominates the memecoin trading space, Solana also plays a crucial role in one of crypto’s most significant non-speculative applications—Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePINs).

What Is DePIN?

DePIN represents an emerging space that connects blockchain technology to real-world applications. Addressing needs such as internet connectivity and computing resources, these physical systems rely on devices like hotspot units, wireless routers, IoT sensors, vehicle dashcams, and GPUs. Participants contribute these resources to the network in exchange for crypto token rewards.

Unlike traditional models that depend on centralized entities such as telecom providers and data centers, DePINs distribute ownership and management across a diverse group of independent contributors. Within Grayscale Research’s classification framework, DePIN assets fall under the Utilities & Services Crypto Sector, operating as application-layer protocols on smart contract blockchains such as Ethereum or Solana.

DePIN Investment Outlook

By decentralizing physical infrastructure across multiple participants, DePIN reduces single points of failure, enhances system resilience, and improves efficiency. This approach fosters innovation, promotes equity, and offers increased flexibility while significantly cutting operational costs. Key advantages of DePIN over traditional centralized models include:

Eliminating the need for centralized intermediaries
Reducing single points of failure and enhancing adaptability to demand surges
Lowering overhead and management costs, sometimes leading to reduced prices for consumers
Aligning incentives between all stakeholders, including resource providers and users

DePIN’s model is particularly relevant in industries with high capital requirements, monopolistic tendencies, or underutilized resources.

Sectors such as internet connectivity, data storage, and computational hardware for AI development—industries collectively worth trillions of dollars—stand to benefit significantly. If DePINs capture even a small fraction of these markets, their impact could be substantial.

Grayscale Research believes this shift is feasible for two reasons: DePINs offer a more efficient business model than traditional alternatives, and existing projects have successfully leveraged crypto incentives to accelerate network adoption.

The State of DePIN Today

DePIN projects span various use cases, including:

Wireless Connectivity & IoT: Helium
Geospatial Data Collection: Hivemapper
Decentralized Video Rendering: Render
AI Computing Networks: Akash

Currently, AI-related DePIN projects dominate by market capitalization. Below, we highlight some of the most promising projects and their use cases.

Helium — Wireless Connectivity & IoT

Helium, built on Solana, pioneered DePIN and serves as a prime example of real-world crypto applications. Helium allows users to monetize unused network capacity in exchange for HNT tokens, creating a decentralized hotspot network. Consumers can access this network at significantly lower rates than traditional alternatives.

As of now, Helium Mobile has over 129,000 subscribers, offering an unlimited data plan for $30 per month—far below the U.S. average of $144 per month. Recently, Helium announced a free mobile plan with limited data, text, and minutes. The network has also partnered with telecom providers like T-Mobile, allowing T-Mobile customers to access Helium’s wireless infrastructure seamlessly. This collaboration reduces congestion in high-traffic areas and lowers operational costs.

Beyond mobile connectivity, Helium supports IoT applications, enabling sensors to transmit data via a decentralized network at a lower cost than conventional Wi-Fi solutions. Similar IoT-focused DePIN projects include Geodnet, Hivemapper, and NATIX, which use IoT sensors for real-time geospatial data collection.

Grass — Decentralized Data Scraping

Grass is another DePIN project with strong AI-related applications. AI models require vast amounts of high-quality data, but traditional data acquisition is monopolized by a few large players like OpenAI and Google. Grass democratizes this process by allowing users to share their unused internet bandwidth in exchange for GRASS tokens. This bandwidth is used for data scraping, which is then sold to AI firms for model training.

Grass has grown its network to 2.5 million nodes across 190 countries, surpassing any other DePIN project. The network has scraped over 20% of YouTube’s data and accumulated more than 7,000 TB of data, providing valuable resources to AI research labs.

Prime Intellect — AI Model Training

Training AI models requires immense computational power, traditionally concentrated in centralized data centers. Prime Intellect disrupts this model by distributing workloads across a decentralized global GPU network. In November, it successfully trained a 10-billion-parameter language model using its DiLoCo framework, which optimizes distributed training across multiple devices.

Competitors in this space include Nous Research, which built the open-source Hermes model, and Flock.io, which facilitates privacy-preserving AI model training for finance and healthcare sectors.

Akash — AI Model Inference

Once AI models are trained, they require significant GPU power for inference. Many data centers have up to 30% unused GPU capacity, yet access to high-performance GPUs remains costly and inefficient. Akash solves this by creating a decentralized GPU leasing marketplace, allowing users to rent GPUs at competitive prices.

Since November, Akash has increased GPU leases from under 200 to over 600, including nearly 400 NVIDIA H100 units. Network fee revenue has grown to an annualized $4.6 million. Akash’s clients include Nvidia-acquired brev.dev, Venice.ai, and UT Austin.

Solana as the Leading DePIN Blockchain

While some DePIN projects operate on standalone Layer 1 blockchains, Solana has emerged as the dominant chain for DePIN applications. Helium and Render, for example, migrated from their original blockchains to Solana due to its speed, cost-effectiveness, and security. Other major DePIN projects built on Solana include Grass, Hivemapper, io.net, and Nosana.

Grayscale Research views Solana as the ideal blockchain for DePINs because it offers:

High transaction speed and low fees
Robust network security and liquidity
An established developer ecosystem that allows DePIN projects to focus on application development rather than infrastructure management

Conclusion

DePIN represents a promising frontier in blockchain technology, proving that crypto’s potential extends beyond speculation. Despite being a young sector, DePIN projects have already demonstrated real-world adoption, forming partnerships with major corporations such as T-Mobile and Nvidia.

Grayscale Research is particularly excited about DePIN applications in internet connectivity, decentralized AI training, and data collection for machine learning models. The future expansion of DePIN is also likely to drive additional growth for Solana, which has established itself as the leading blockchain for these networks.

For investors seeking early-stage exposure, assets like Helium (wireless/IoT) and Bittensor (AI) present compelling opportunities. As DePIN continues to evolve, its impact on the broader blockchain ecosystem could be profound.

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