One theme that keeps coming up in this 60 day journey is the question: where does Web3 actually touch the real world? In Day 42, we looked at regenerative stablecoins and how impact backed money can quietly fund climate positive assets behind the scenes.
Today I want to zoom out from money and talk about another way blockchains are leaking into reality: DePIN, decentralized physical infrastructure networks.
If you have seen projects like Helium for wireless hotspots, Hivemapper for maps from dashcams, or Render for distributed GPU power and wondered what ties them together, DePIN is the mental model.
This is Day 43 of my 60 Days of Web3 experiment.
If you are new here and want the full journey, you can read it on
Medium at @Ribhavmodi, on Future at Ribhav on Future, and hang out with us in the Web3ForHumans Telegram at Web3ForHumans.
What DePIN actually is in human terms
DePIN stands for Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network. In plain language, it is what you get when you take something that used to be built by one big company, like a telecom network, a map provider, or a GPU cloud, and let a distributed community build and own it instead. Instead of a single company buying all the hardware and collecting all the revenue, individuals and small operators deploy devices, contribute resources, and get rewarded with tokens.
Under the hood there are a few common ingredients. You have physical hardware such as hotspots, sensors, dashcams, servers, storage boxes, and GPUs, which are real devices in the real world. You have a blockchain to track who contributed what, who used what, and to settle rewards and payments transparently. You also have token incentives so that users who provide coverage, data, compute, or storage earn tokens, while users who consume those services pay in tokens or via some fiat or stablecoin bridge.
If earlier in the series we talked about blockchain as a shared ledger in things like Blockchain for Non Technical People, DePIN is that idea attached to antennas, cameras, and machines.
Why DePIN exists and what problem it is poking at
Traditional infrastructure networks are heavy, slow, and centralized. To roll out wireless coverage, maps, or data centers, you usually need huge capital budgets, long planning cycles, and a business case that justifies serving a given region. That often means rural or low income areas get ignored, innovation is bottlenecked by a handful of gatekeepers, and the people who actually live in or contribute to the network rarely share in the upside. So, a there are a wide range of the open challenges as well as opportunities faced by DePIN.
DePIN flips that model by letting anyone deploy a small piece of the network, such as a hotspot, a dashcam, or a GPU node, and letting the protocol coordinate those contributions and measure useful work. Crypto incentives then nudge the network to grow where demand is, not just where a centralized operator feels like investing. In that sense, DePIN is related to a lot of things we have already covered, especially DeFi 101: Decentralized Finance and the piece on Web3 infrastructure as invisible plumbing, but with more antennas and fewer yield curves.
Concrete DePIN examples so it feels less abstract
There are many projects under the DePIN umbrella now, but three categories make the idea click for me: wireless, maps, and compute.
Wireless, for example Helium. Helium started with IoT coverage, where people buy and plug in hotspots at home, those hotspots provide wireless coverage, and they earn tokens when devices actually route traffic through them. Instead of one telecom operator deploying all the towers, you get many small operators contributing small chunks of the network.
Mapping, for example Hivemapper. Hivemapper uses dashcams and a token to crowdsource map data. Drivers record streets while going about their normal day, the network turns that into a live map, and contributors earn for adding or improving coverage. It is like turning the data layer of Google Maps into something anyone can help build and monetize.
Compute and storage, for example Render. Render connects people with idle GPUs to people who need rendering or AI compute, and pays providers in tokens. Similar patterns exist for decentralized storage and other cloud like resources. Once you see the pattern, it feels like DeFi style incentives applied to physical infrastructure instead of just liquidity pools.
How DePIN works under the hood without going too deep
Most DePIN designs follow a similar high level flow. First, someone deploys hardware. They install a hotspot, dashcam, sensor, storage node, or GPU rig, and register it with the network. Next, the network tries to measure useful work. Protocol rules and oracles detect whether the device is actually providing value in terms of coverage, data, compute, storage, or uptime, and try to filter out fake or low value activity.
Then rewards and payments flow through tokens. On the supply side, contributors earn tokens roughly proportional to the useful work their hardware does. On the demand side, users or applications that consume that service pay for it, sometimes directly in the network’s token, sometimes through a stablecoin or fiat bridge. Finally, governance and upgrades happen through some form of token based or multi stakeholder process that can adjust rewards, onboarding rules, and slashing conditions over time.
If DeFi was our first taste of code capturing financial flows, as we saw in DeFi 101, DePIN is code coordinating physical networks. Both depend on incentives not being completely misaligned with reality. cointelegraph
Why DePIN is interesting and not just another buzzword
There are a few reasons I think DePIN deserves a spot in a Web3 fundamentals journey. It is one of the clearest stories where Web3 touches the real world. You can literally walk around your city and see hotspots, dashcams, or nodes that belong to these networks, which makes phrases like protocol owned infrastructure feel less abstract. It also gives individuals a way to share upside in networks they help build, instead of everything being owned by telecoms, cloud providers, or big mapping companies.
It also forces better thinking about incentives. If you reward the wrong behavior, such as just plugging in hardware anywhere, you get maps of empty roads or wireless coverage where nobody lives. Good DePIN design becomes a live lesson in game theory and mechanism design. For someone like me who has been focused on DeFi, stablecoins, and ZK lately, as in Zero Knowledge Proofs: Powering Web3 Privacy and Trust, DePIN feels like a complementary half of the story where tokens pay for bandwidth and bytes rather than just swaps and yield.
The messy reality: it is not all passive income and good vibes
On the hype heavy side of Crypto Twitter, DePIN can sound like buy a box, plug it in, and retire. Reality is more nuanced. There is hardware and location risk. If incentives drop or the protocol over saturates a region, people who spent real money on devices can be left with sunk costs. Measuring real work is also hard, because whether it is coverage, maps, or compute, the protocol has to distinguish between genuine contributions and spam or fake activity.
Demand also has to be real, not just speculative. A DePIN token can go up in price on future potential, but long term sustainability depends on real users paying for the underlying service such as connectivity, map tiles, compute time, or storage. There are also regulatory gray zones, because if you start complementing or competing with telecoms, cloud providers, or infrastructure companies, you inherit some of their regulatory baggage too, even if there is a token in between.
So I am filing DePIN in the same mental drawer as DeFi and ReFi. It has huge potential and is very cool when it works, but it is also full of design and execution traps that builders and users should be honest about.
Where DePIN fits in my Day 43 mental map
By Day 43, my internal map of Web3 looks like a three layer stack. At the base layer you have blockchains, consensus, and infrastructure, which we covered in the early days of this series. On top of that you have the financial layer, which includes DeFi, stablecoins, RWAs, and now regenerative money from Day 17 and Day 42. Then you have the physical layer, which is DePIN, networks where tokens pay for real world bandwidth, maps, compute, and more.
DePIN is that third layer where tokens are not just numbers on a screen but knobs that help shape where physical infrastructure gets deployed. It is still early, and many projects will not survive, but as a pattern it feels important enough to be part of this 60 day foundation. As with most topics in this series, this is my learning log in public, not a buy list or investment thesis. If you are working on DePIN or have thoughts on what good DePIN design looks like, I would love to hear them.
Resources
Here are a few resources that helped me get a clearer picture of DePIN and some real world examples.
Decentralized physical infrastructure network – Wikipedia
Decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN), explained – Cointelegraph
What is DePIN? – Kraken
DePIN Crypto: How It Is Revolutionizing Infrastructure in Web3 – Ulam
DePIN Projects That Are Worth Your Attention in 2025 – Beluga
Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN) – arXiv arxiv
If you know other good explainers, threads, or talks, feel free to send them my way and I will happily add them to my own notes.
If you are on a similar Web3 learning path
This note is part of my public 60 Days of Web3 journey, one concept per day, explained in human terms, with all the confusion and course corrections left in.
You can read the full journey on Medium, follow on Future
and join the community on Telegram at Web3ForHumans.
If something here feels off, incomplete, or sparks an idea, reply, quote it, or write your own version. I am learning in public so you do not have to do it alone.
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