6 use cases for Decentralized Physical Infrastructure (DePIN)

Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks, or DePIN, offer a new model for building and operating real-world systems. Although the term “DePIN” might feel conflated with decentralized energy, there are many other industry applications. 

So why decentralize physical infrastructure? At their core, DePIN protocols offer an alternative to the monopolistic, opaque, and outmoded infrastructure systems we rely on today, reimagining them as open, permissionless networks that are owned and operated by users. These networks can lower barriers to entry, incentivize innovation, and distribute not just ownership but sharing in economic rewards across almost any category that relies on massive systems of physical infrastructure. 

Great in theory, but how is DePIN actually playing out across real-world use cases? What progress have builders made so far? And what’s left to explore? Here are six categories where DePIN is already making inroads, and where we may be headed next. 

As we’ve written before, energy is already decentralizing for a number of reasons — for example, homes can generate energy using solar panels, and then sell excess energy stored in batteries back to the grid. DePIN builds on this by unlocking new ways for energy providers to manage grids, including input from the edges; for consumers to participate in energy markets; and for creating more resilient energy grids through decentralized virtual power plants (VPPs). 

The idea behind VPPs is that many distributed energy resources (DERs) — like rooftop solar panels, EV chargers, micro-turbines, and others — can combine to supply power in place of a traditional large-scale power plant. Conceptually, VPPs are a lot like distributed networks of batteries that can help discharge energy back to the energy grid during times of high demand — for example, during extreme weather). 

Eventually VPPs can also support microgrids — localized grids that can operate independently. Microgrids stand to become an increasingly exciting space for DePIN with new approvals for small modular nuclear reactors that can supply power in remote locations. 

We’ve seen a number of companies working towards VPPs. Daylight, for example, is building a protocol that enables anyone who owns a solar panel or another grid-connected device to sell energy and information about that device back to energy companies. This can help with better real-time grid management. We’ve also seen companies create incentives to deploy new solar panels, to create new carbon credits, and to tokenize existing carbon credits. 

The result could be a more robust and efficient energy grid, user-owned power generation, and better data. If you’re curious to learn more, check out our reading list on decentralized energy here. 

Telecom networks — from cellular networks to home internet — tend to embody the same challenges and criticisms of today’s physical infrastructure networks: A high barrier for new entrants has led to a lack of competition, inadequate price transparency, inefficient customer service, connectivity issues, poor coverage, and many others. So it’s not surprising that it’s been one of the first proving grounds for DePIN. 

We’ve seen a number of companies attempt to compete at building decentralized cellular networks, which are building cost-effective, flexible, and community-driven alternatives to entrenched traditional providers. The draw for consumers includes low cost, and censorship-resistant connectivity. The draw for enterprises, on the other hand, is the ability to scale faster, expand coverage, and cut infrastructure costs via community-deployed hardware.

Helium, for example, is one of the defining DePIN companies and the first at-scale decentralized telecom network. They started by building a low-power, long-range wireless network for Internet of Things (IoT) devices using LoRaWAN technology. It has since expanded to include a 5G cellular network. 

Another exciting and under-explored space in this category is home internet. Home internet delivered via fixed wireless access can be cheaper and faster than existing wired home internet, and is a natural fit for decentralized deployment. Fixed wireless access means telecom companies don’t need to run wires from a data center to your house, and instead can use a wireless link. This shift presents an opportunity to change the economics of home internet as a wireless link can be much cheaper than laying cable, and allow for more competition.

Traditional food delivery apps face the same issues as many other centralized platforms — fees for both restaurants and consumers, centralized control, a lack of ownership for restaurants over their customer base, and others. Decentralizing food delivery and other services, like ride sharing, offer the opportunity for lower take rates and truly user-owned and operated local networks.

As a result, DePIN is picking up speed in transportation through decentralized ridesharing, food delivery, and mapping networks that reduce platform fees and give ownership to users. These systems rely on crypto incentives to reward contributors, and open up new possibilities for user-owned infrastructure — from restaurant-owned delivery services to decentralized geolocation using inexpensive Bluetooth stickers or satellite based networks. 

Beyond these examples, many DePIN protocols are fundamentally about crowdsourcing a database, and that’s especially true with transportation data. We can use decentralized databases to map roads using dashcams or map wider areas using drones. These real-time maps update much more frequently than traditional approaches, and potentially more accurately as well, because they crowdsource more data samples from a more diverse, decentralized network. 

While most AI products are digital services, industry advancement is increasingly bottlenecked by physical infrastructure like energy, GPU clusters, and more. DePIN can help democratize access to the compute infrastructure underlying AI innovation — making it cheaper, more resilient, and more resistant to censorship. 

How? Two of the biggest barriers to AI advancement have been energy and access to chips. Decentralized energy can help make more power available as detailed earlier, but builders are also using DePIN to aggregate unused chips from gaming PCs, data centers, and other sources. These computers come together to form a permissionless compute marketplace, which is important as it’s currently cost prohibitive for anyone but the biggest companies (think OpenAI and Microsoft) to fund large models. Here, DePIN can level the playing field for building new AI products. 

Centralization of AI models among a handful of companies is another timely concern. Decentralized networks can help create more cost effective, more censorship resistant, and more scalable AI. Other use cases for decentralized AI marketplaces include distributed training and fine tuning of LLMs, as well as distributed networks for model inference. Decentralized training and inference can potentially lead to much lower costs because they use otherwise latent compute that’s unused and invisible to networks. Decentralized training and inference also provide censorship resistance, ensuring that developers don’t get de-platformed by hyperscalars — large-scale, centralized cloud service providers that offer massively scalable computing infrastructure.

With the explosion in training of new embodied AI models — essentially creating AI that walks, talks, and interacts with the world — DePIN will be one way to crowdsource datasets for training future robots. This includes incentivizing users to complete simple tasks like folding clothes or washing dishes while wearing an XR headset. The goal here is to create training data for robots in the hope that they could one day automate these tasks. 

Other areas founders are currently exploring include:

• Crowdsourcing data directly from humans operating robots as a source of training data
• Robot-to-robot communications and payment networks, so that robots can purchase real-time data about the world around them from other robots or DePIN data networks

As embodied AI moves from research to real-world use cases, DePIN offers a foundation for scaling and coordination that takes robots closer to adaptive, data-driven agents.

In keeping with the idea of crowdsourcing a dataset, as with decentralized databases in transportation, DePIN can provide a way for users to collect and monetize data about their health. 

Fitness wearables already generate personal health data; with crypto-enabled decentralized infrastructure, they can also encourage healthier behaviors through token rewards. Users can then sell their data to healthcare companies or insurance providers as proof that users are working to improve their health, helping to reduce insurance premiums. This data is also useful for epidemiological studies, and the burgeoning DeSci (decentralized science) community has pushed for running bottom-up clinical trials as well as other decentralized providers that can connect enterprise medical institutions with decentralized data. 

This approach empowers patients with control over their data, fosters healthier behaviors, and supports decentralized clinical trials — aligning with the DeSci movement’s goals of democratizing scientific research through changing how research is funded, shared, and owned beyond central intermediaries.

This is obviously not an exhaustive list, but it does show the widespread uses of decentralizing all the physical things. I’m excited to see new DePIN projects take on ambitious goals. If you’re building a DePIN protocol please reach out to me on X.

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