peaq

What it does

peaq is a Layer-1 blockchain built specifically for what it calls the “Machine Economy”: a world where machines, vehicles, robots, and IoT devices operate as first-class economic participants. Not controlled by humans through apps, but transacting autonomously: a car paying for its own charging, a drone selling its weather data, a robot renting its idle time.

Built on Substrate and running as a Polkadot parachain, peaq provides native modules that are built into the chain itself, not deployed as smart contracts:

• peaq ID – Self-sovereign machine identities (W3C DID-compliant). Every machine gets a decentralised identity.
• peaq access – Role-based access control for machine-to-machine permissions
• peaq verify – On-chain verification of machine data
• peaq store – Key-value storage for verifiable machine data
• peaq pay – Machine-to-machine payment infrastructure
• UMT – Nanosecond-precision time synchronisation for coordinated machine operations

The chain supports both EVM (Solidity) and WASM (Rust/ink!) smart contracts, so developers can build in whichever environment they prefer. Performance sits at approximately 49,000 TPS with 500ms blockBlockA batch of transactions added to a blockchain at a set interval. Each block cryptographically links to the previous one, creating an append-only chain that can't be rewritten without redoing all the work since.Like a page in a ledger. Every page has a fixed number of entries, every page references the previous page, and once a page is filled and signed off it can't be edited without visibly invalidating every page that came after. The chain is just a very long series of these sealed pages.Read more → finalisation as of Q3 2025, with a target of 100,000+ TPS.

Founded in 2017 by Till Wendler, Leonard Dorlochter, and Max Thake. The entity behind peaq is EoT Labs GmbH, registered in Berlin, Germany. Max Thake previously built Advanced Blockchain AG, the first blockchain development company listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. The team delivered blockchain solutions for Audi before starting peaq. Michael Ganser, former CEO of Cisco Germany, is an advisor.

Mainnet launched November 2024. The network also operates krest, a canary network on Polkadot’s Kusama chain for testing.

Value proposition

Ecosystem scale. peaq has assembled 60+ DePINs (Decentralised Physical InfrastructureDePINDecentralised Physical Infrastructure Networks. Protocols that use token incentives to coordinate real-world physical infrastructure like GPU compute, wireless networks, storage, mapping sensors, or bandwidth.Like crowd-sourced ride-sharing but for physical hardware. Uber incentivises drivers with dollars. DePIN incentivises hardware operators with tokens. The network grows because individuals choose to contribute capacity in exchange for rewards.Read more → Networks) across 22 industries on a single chain. The major ones:

• Teneo – claims 6M+ community nodes across 190 countries (social data crowdsourcing)
• DeNet – claims 6M+ storage users, 9 petabytes stored, 15M files secured
• Silencio – claims 1.2M+ users across 180+ countries (noise pollution data for AI trainingTrainingThe one-time process of teaching a neural network to perform a task by showing it massive amounts of example data and adjusting its internal weights until the outputs are good. Training builds the model; inference uses it.Like the years an apprentice spends learning a trade. You don't see any of the actual work, just thousands of repeated mistakes gradually becoming competence. By the end, the apprentice can do the job. The training was invisible, but the skill is now permanent.Read more →)
• MapMetrics – claims 200,000+ drivers (community navigation)
• SkyX – claims 26,000 contributors from 125 countries, 125TB+ decentralised weather data
• XMAQUINA – claims $35M+ DAO treasury investing in robotics companies
• Bistroo – claims 200,000+ active users, $18.6M food delivery volume

Enterprise partnerships include NTT, Continental, Airbus, Mastercard, Bosch, and Gaia. The network processed 40.4 million transactions in Q3 2025.

The counter-narrative is simple: activity without monetisation. All of this network breadth generates just $163,600 in annualised fees according to DeFiLlama. Sixty DePINs, millions of users, enterprise logos, and the chain earns less in a year than a single restaurant. TVLTVLTotal Value Locked. The sum of all assets currently deposited in a protocol's smart contracts. TVL is the standard measure of how much capital a DeFi or DeAI protocol is custodying.Like the assets under management of a hedge fund. AUM tells you how much money the fund has been trusted with, which is a rough proxy for how much business it's doing. TVL plays the same role for crypto protocols.Read more → remains negligible for an L1L1Layer 1. A base blockchain that runs its own consensus mechanism, executes transactions, and settles its own state. Bitcoin, Ethereum, NEAR, and Solana are all L1s. Anything built on top of an L1 is technically a Layer 2 or higher.Like the foundation of a building. Nothing else can exist on top until the foundation is solid. Different L1s make different tradeoffs for what kind of building they can support.Read more → chain.

The Machine Economy thesis is directionally correct. Machines will increasingly need to transact. The question is timing. Is the world ready for autonomous machine-to-machine payments in 2026? The $163.6K in fees suggests not yet.

For the sovereignty thesis, peaq provides self-sovereign machine identities and permissionless infrastructure. But it isn’t privacy-preserving: data on peaq is visible on-chain. And as a Polkadot parachain, the chain’s security depends on maintaining its parachain slotSlotA fixed time interval during which a single block can be produced on a Proof of Stake blockchain. Slots are the smallest unit of consensus time and group together to form epochs.Like a 12-second window in a relay race during which exactly one runner is supposed to be on the track. If the runner shows up and completes their leg, the race continues. If they're absent, the slot is empty and the next runner starts the next slot.Read more →. It’s infrastructure for machines to operate independently, which is a different but related angle on sovereignty.

peaq’s DePIN positioning: why 60+ projects chose this chain

Sixty-plus DePINs have built on peaq. The interesting question isn’t what peaq does. It’s why they chose this chain over Solana, Base, or Ethereum.

Specialisation is the answer. General-purpose blockchains treat machines the same as humans: you need a walletWalletSoftware that stores the private keys needed to control tokens on a blockchain. A wallet does not actually hold any tokens. The tokens live on the chain. The wallet holds the keys that prove you own them.Like the key to a safe deposit box. The key doesn't contain your valuables. The valuables sit in the bank's vault. The key is what proves you're allowed to open the box and take them.Read more →, you sign transactions, you interact with smart contracts. peaq treats machines as first-class economic participants with native infrastructure built into the chain itself, not deployed as smart contracts, but embedded at the protocol level.

peaq IDs give every machine a self-sovereign identity compliant with W3C DID standards. A car, a drone, a sensor array. Each gets a decentralised identity that persists across applications without depending on a centralised registry. This is the foundation: machines cannot transact autonomously if they cannot prove who they are.

peaq Pay handles machine-to-machine micropayments natively. When a drone sells its weather data to an insurance company, the payment settles on-chain without human intervention. The fee structure is designed for high-frequency, low-value transactions that would be prohibitively expensive on Ethereum.

peaq Access provides role-based permissions for machine interactions. A fleet of delivery robots can be granted access to a warehouse’s loading dock programmatically, with permissions that expire, rotate, and audit automatically.

Enterprise partnerships validate the thesis at pilot level: NTT, Continental, Airbus, Mastercard, Bosch, Gaia. These are not marketing logos. NTT is running a data marketplace pilot. Airbus is exploring decentralised drone identity. Bosch is evaluating supply chain verification. But the distance between “exploring” and “production deployment generating revenue” is vast. In construction, we call this the gap between letters of intent and executed contracts. peaq has the letters.

Honestly: the technology is genuinely purpose-built and well-engineered. The 60+ DePINs are real projects building real applications. But $163,600 in annualised fees across all of them tells you that the Machine Economy is still ahead of the market. The infrastructure is ready. The machines are not yet transacting at scale.

How peaq compares to other DePIN infrastructure

peaq made a bet: build a chain specifically for machines rather than adapting a general-purpose chain. How does that bet compare?

peaq vs Solana. Solana hosts more DePINs by market cap (Helium, Render, Hivemapper). The liquidityLiquidityHow easily a token can be bought or sold without moving the price. High liquidity means you can enter or exit large positions quickly at the quoted price. Low liquidity means even small trades can swing the market.Like the difference between selling a house and selling a share of Apple stock. The house might be worth more on paper, but finding a buyer at that price takes weeks. The Apple share converts to cash in one click.Read more → is deeper, the developer tools are more mature, and the user base is larger. But Solana treats DePIN the same as DeFiDeFiDecentralised Finance. Financial services like lending, trading, and yield farming built on smart contracts instead of traditional banks or brokerages. DeFi protocols are usually permissionless and global.Like a vending machine that can give you a loan, swap your currencies, or invest your savings. Nobody is behind the counter, the rules are written into the machine itself, and anyone with money in the right format can use it.Read more → or NFTs: generic smart contracts on a fast chain. peaq’s native machine identity, M2M payments, and access control modules are purpose-built. The trade-off is network size (Solana wins) versus specialisation (peaq wins).

peaq vs IoTeX. The closest competitor in the machine-specific L1 space. IoTeX focuses on “DePIN as a Service” with W3bstream middleware for off-chain compute verification. peaq focuses on on-chain machine identity and payments. IoTeX has a longer track record (mainnet since 2019) but smaller DePIN count. Both are betting that machines need specialised infrastructure. Neither has proven the commercial case yet.

peaq vs Polkadot. As a Polkadot parachain, peaq inherits shared security from the Relay Chain. This is a double-edged sword: strong security without maintaining your own validatorValidatorA computer that runs the full blockchain protocol, verifies transactions, and proposes new blocks. Validators are the workers that keep a Proof of Stake network running, and they earn rewards for doing the work correctly.Like a notary public who witnesses and stamps legal documents. Validators witness transactions, check they follow the rules, and stamp them into the permanent record. A notary who commits fraud loses their license. Validators work the same way, except the license is staked tokens that get slashed on misbehaviour.Read more → set, but dependency on Polkadot’s health and the need to maintain a parachain slot. If Polkadot contracts, peaq’s security modelModelA trained neural network that takes inputs (text, images, audio) and produces outputs (more text, classifications, generated content). In DeAI the model is the thing that actually does the work.Like a very experienced apprentice who has spent years watching thousands of masters make furniture. They can't explain how they know when a joint is right, but they can make a chair that looks and functions like a Chippendale. The training is invisible. The output is what matters.Read more → is directly affected.

The broader question is whether the Machine Economy needs a specialised L1 at all, or whether general-purpose chains with smart contract-based machine identity will be good enough. peaq is betting on specialisation. The answer won’t be clear until autonomous machine transactions happen at scale. That’s still years away.

Tokenomics

PEAQ launched with a genesis supply of 4.2 billion tokens. There’s no maximum supply. The model is disinflationary, starting at 3.5% annual inflationInflationThe annual rate at which new tokens are created and added to the circulating supply. Most networks use inflation to pay validators, stakers, and infrastructure providers from freshly minted tokens rather than real revenue.Like a landlord who raises the rent every year. If your salary goes up at the same rate, you break even. If it doesn't, you get poorer without noticing, because the number on your payslip hasn't changed but the ground under it has shifted.Read more → and decreasing by 10% each year until it stabilises at 1% (approximately 12 years post-launch). A burnBurnPermanently removing tokens from circulation by sending them to an address that no one controls. Burns reduce total supply, which (all else equal) makes each remaining token worth more of the network's value.Like a company buying back its own shares and shredding them. The company's total value stays the same, but each remaining share now represents a slightly bigger slice of that value.Read more → mechanism introduced in early 2026 destroys a portion of transaction fees, bringing effective inflation down to roughly 2.5% from the scheduled ~3.15% rate in Year 2. Combined with the VEO programme’s structured sell pressure management, the actual dilution is lower than the nominal emission schedule suggests.

Funding totalled approximately $24.9 million across rounds: pre-seed (EUR 750K, October 2020), seed (EUR 2.5M, June 2021), second seed ($6M led by Fundamental Labs, June 2022), and Series A ($15M led by Generative Ventures and Borderless Capital, March 2024). Investors include Spartan Group, HV Capital, CMCC Global, Animoca Brands, and Moonrock Capital.

Distribution:

• Ecosystem & Treasury: 20% – 48-month linear vestingVestingA schedule that locks up tokens allocated to insiders, investors, and team members, releasing them gradually over months or years. Vesting prevents insiders from dumping on public buyers immediately after launch.Like a new employee's stock options at a startup. You don't get all the shares on day one. They unlock over four years so you stick around and do the work rather than cashing out and leaving.Read more →
• Community Initiatives: 15% – 36-month linear vesting
• Private Sale: 13% – 6-month cliffCliffA waiting period at the start of a token vesting schedule during which no tokens unlock at all. After the cliff ends, tokens begin releasing according to the vesting schedule.Like a probationary period at a new job. You don't get your stock options on day one. You wait 12 months to prove you'll stick around, then everything starts unlocking normally.Read more →, 18-month linear, 7.5% at unlock
• Core Team: 11.5% – 9-month cliff, 36-month linear
• EoT Labs: 8.5% – 9-month cliff, 36-month linear
• Pre-Seed: 7% – 6-month cliff, 24-month linear, 5% at unlock
• Launchpad/Community Sale: 6% – 6-month linear
• Seed: 5% – 6-month cliff, 24-month linear, 5% at unlock
• Network Security: 5% – 54-month linear (Polkadot coretime purchases)

Circulating supplyCirculating SupplyThe number of tokens currently in circulation and tradeable on the open market. Differs from total supply (which includes locked or unvested tokens) and max supply (the upper limit, if there is one).Like the number of cars on the road today versus the number ever produced. Some are in showrooms, some in junkyards, some still at the factory. Only the ones on the road count toward what people are actually driving.Read more → is approximately 1.86 billion PEAQ (44.3%). The insider allocation (Core Team 11.5% + EoT Labs 8.5% + Pre-Seed 7% + Seed 5% + Private Sale 13% = 45%) is heavy.

Inflation distribution is structured: 40% to validators and delegators, 25% to General Treasury, 20% to DePIN Incentive Pool, 10% to Security Treasury (coretime), 5% to Machine Subsidisation Pool. The DePIN Incentive Pool is the interesting one: it directly funds machine-economy adoption.

The tokenTokenA digital unit of value or access rights tracked on a blockchain. Tokens can represent ownership in a project, a right to use a service, a share of future revenue, or simply a tradable asset with no underlying claim.Like a physical poker chip a casino issues. The chip itself has no value. What makes it worth something is what it lets you do at the casino, what the casino has promised, and how much other people will pay you for it.Read more → is down approximately 98% from its all-time high set at launch in November 2024. Live price data is displayed above.

StakingStakingLocking up a cryptocurrency to help secure a blockchain network, usually in exchange for rewards. The locked tokens act as a security deposit that can be taken away if the staker misbehaves.Like putting down a large rental deposit for an apartment. You get the money back if you behave, you earn interest while it's locked, and the landlord takes it if you trash the place.Read more → is DPoS/NPoS with APY ranging 5-15% depending on total staked. Slashing exists for validator misbehaviour.

Vested Emission Offerings (VEOs). In mid-2025, peaq launched a VEO programme through Lucid Finance’s platform. Early investors can offer portions of their vested tokens at a 12.5% discount to market price with a 3-month linear vesting schedule. Participating investors commit approximately 10% of proceeds as an in-kind contribution to the peaq Foundation, which channels these funds into MachineX (peaq’s DEXDEXDecentralised Exchange. A trading venue where token swaps happen entirely through smart contracts, with no central operator holding user funds. The largest DEXes are Uniswap, Aerodrome, Raydium, PancakeSwap, and Curve.Like a self-service vending machine that lets you swap one type of coin for another. The machine sets the exchange rate based on its current stock, anyone can deposit coins to refill it, and there's no clerk behind the counter.Read more →) to strengthen ecosystem liquidity. All transactions execute on-chain through smart contracts. No backroom deals. The programme sold out five VEOs worth $306,100 in its first month, with $500,000 in total vested PEAQ made available, and a second round of 2.8M+ tokens followed. This is a sensible mechanism: it gives early investors a structured exit route while preventing the sudden dumps that kill token prices, and it channels real liquidity into the network. Whether it materially affects sell pressure at scale remains to be seen.

Listed on Kraken, KuCoin, Gate.io, MEXC, Bitget, Crypto.com, Coinone, and others. Notably on Binance Alpha only (not the main exchange). Live price and volume data is displayed above.

How to participate

Stake PEAQ. Delegate tokens to validators via DPoS. 40% of inflation goes to validators and delegators. APY 5-15% depending on total staked. Slashing risk via validator selection. Technical skill: basic. Requires PEAQ tokens and a compatible wallet.

Run a validator. Operate a collator node (creates blocks) or delegator node (ensures finalisation via Polkadot Relay Chain). Substrate node operation. Technical skill: advanced. Server hardware required with uptime commitments.

Build a DePIN. Deploy EVM or WASM smart contracts and use native machine-economy modules. SDKs available in JavaScript, Python, and Rust. 20% of inflation goes to DePIN Incentive Pool; grants available. Technical skill: advanced. This is the participation method that grows the network.

Honest assessment

Freedom Score: 53/100

peaq is a well-engineered open-source L1 but with centralised control dynamics and Polkadot dependency.

Infrastructure Decentralisation: 12/20. Polkadot parachain with DPoS/NPoS. Secured by Relay Chain validators. 49K TPS achieved. However, parachain dependency means peaq isn’t independently sovereign; its liveness depends on maintaining a Polkadot slot. Collator set size and distribution not documented. Enterprise focus suggests some centralisation in key relationships.

Governance Decentralisation: 9/20. peaq has published a four-phase governance roadmap: (1) Foundation era at genesis with pools dormant; (2) committee on-chain governanceDAODecentralised Autonomous Organisation. A way to coordinate decisions and manage a treasury using token-weighted voting instead of a traditional company structure. Token holders propose and vote on changes directly.Like a shareholder-run company where every shareholder can vote on every decision, the votes are public, and the company can't do anything the shareholders don't approve. The coordination is messier than a normal company but nobody has unilateral control.Read more → via a six-member council operating within strict parametersParametersThe internal numbers (weights and biases) inside a neural network that get adjusted during training. A 70-billion-parameter model has 70 billion adjustable internal numbers encoding everything it has learned.Like the synapses in a human brain. Each parameter is a tiny dial that gets nudged a little during training. With enough dials, the network can represent surprisingly complex patterns. The total parameter count is roughly how much "brain" the model has.Read more → (current phase); (3) community committee inclusion where token holders gradually gain voting rights; (4) fully decentralised on-chain governance where PEAQ holders control proposals, voting, and parameter changes directly. The roadmap is credible and well-structured, but peaq is still in phase 2, a six-member council with undisclosed identities making decisions on behalf of the Foundation. The 45% insider allocation concentrates voting power. Score reflects current state, not the destination.

Token Distribution Fairness: 5/15. 45% insider allocation: Core Team 11.5% + EoT Labs 8.5% + Pre-Seed 7% + Seed 5% + Private Sale 13%. Community-accessible allocation is approximately 21% (Community Initiatives 15% + Launchpad 6%). Ecosystem & Treasury (20%) is team-controlled. Only 44.3% circulating after 16 months.

Censorship Resistance: 8/15. Permissionless chain: anyone can deploy EVM or WASM contracts. Machine identities (DIDs) are self-sovereign. Polkadot shared security is a meaningful strength here. However, parachain dependency and enterprise integrations may introduce compliance requirements. No privacy features for machine data.

Data Sovereignty: 8/15. Self-sovereign machine identities (W3C DID compliant) and verifiable machine data storage are substantive sovereignty features. However, no privacy-preserving computation; data stored on-chain is visible. No encryption guarantees beyond what applications implement.

Open Source Transparency: 11/15. 97 public GitHub repos with active development. Core chain is 98.3% Rust. CertiK audit scored 97.96/100. SRL audit completed. SDKs in JS, Python, Rust all open source. Good transparency. Score limited because SRL audit reports are not publicly readable from repos.

Returns Score: 48/100

Token Utility: 15/20. PEAQ is used for gasGasThe fee paid to a blockchain to process a transaction. Gas is denominated in the chain's native token and varies with network demand. Sending a transaction without enough gas means the transaction fails and the gas is still consumed.Like the petrol that powers a car. You need to put petrol in to make the engine run. The amount of petrol you need depends on how far you're driving and how much you're carrying. If you run out, the car stops.Read more → fees, staking (DPoS/NPoS), governance, machine identity registration, and M2M payments. The token is structurally essential to the chain; 60+ DePINs use it for operations. Strong multi-utility design with real on-chain usage.

Value Accrual: 9/20. Transaction fees paid in PEAQ (gas). 40% of inflation distributed to validators and delegators. 20% of inflation to DePIN Incentive Pool. No fee distribution to non-staking holders. The VEO programme channels 10% of early investor exit proceeds into MachineX DEX liquidity, which is a modest but actual accrual mechanism. With only $163.6K annualised fees, fee-based accrual is negligible. Value accrual remains primarily through staking inflation, not protocol revenue.

Supply Dynamics: 10/20. No max supply but well-structured disinflationary model: inflation started at 3.5%, with a burn mechanism introduced in early 2026 bringing effective inflation to roughly 2.5% (down from the scheduled ~3.15% nominal rate in Year 2), trending toward 1% over 12 years. 44.3% circulating after 16 months is reasonable progress. Insider vesting is documented with cliffs and linear schedules. No verified burn mechanism despite some third-party claims of partial fee burns. The VEO programme through Lucid Finance manages early investor exits through discounted vested sales (12.5% discount, 3-month vesting), channelling 10% of proceeds into on-chain liquidity, a practical supply management tool, though it does not reduce total supply. Score reflects the scheduled disinflation, VEO programme, and thoughtful emission design, but meaningful inflation is ongoing and 55.7% of genesis supply remains locked.

Revenue Sustainability: 8/25. Real usage exists: 40.4 million transactions in Q3 2025, 60+ DePINs, 6M+ machines and people on-chain. Enterprise partnerships (NTT, Continental, Airbus, Bosch) suggest commercial traction. But monetisation is minimal: $163.6K annualised fees doesn’t cover chain operating costs. Revenue doesn’t come close to covering emissionsEmissionsNew tokens created and distributed by a blockchain protocol over time as rewards to validators, stakers, or miners. Emissions fund network security and participation at the cost of diluting existing holders.Like a company that pays employees partly in newly printed shares. Every year the total number of shares goes up, which means existing shareholders own a slightly smaller slice of the same company unless the company grows faster than the printing.Read more →. Early-stage activity without sustainable monetisation.

Liquidity & Access: 6/15. Listed on Kraken, KuCoin, Gate.io, MEXC, Bitget, and Crypto.com. On Binance Alpha only (not main exchange). 19 exchanges total. Adequate for small-to-medium positions but thin for larger trades.

Quadrant: D (Low Freedom, Low Returns)

peaq sits on the border of Quadrants B and D. The open-source infrastructure and DePIN thesis have sovereignty relevance, but the 45% insider allocation and Polkadot dependency, combined with minimal revenue, place it in Quadrant D. Technically interesting but not yet delivering on either sovereignty or returns.

Key risks

• Activity without monetisation. 60+ DePINs, millions of users, enterprise logos, and $163.6K annualised fees. The network is broad but not deep in commercial terms.
• Token collapse. Down approximately 98% from ATHATHAll-Time High. The highest price a token has ever reached. ATH is usually quoted as a reference point for how far the current price has fallen (or risen) since the peak.Like the record lap time on a racetrack. It tells you what the car has been capable of at its absolute best, not what it will do today. Whether that record gets broken again depends on conditions that may or may not come back.Read more →. CoinList and early investors are deeply underwater.
• Insider overhang. 45% allocated to team, entity, and investors with vesting still in progress. Significant sell pressure as tokens unlock.
• Polkadot dependency. As a parachain, peaq’s liveness depends on maintaining a Polkadot slot. Polkadot’s health directly affects peaq.
• Concentration risk. 6M+ on-chain users are dominated by Teneo alone. If a few large DePINs leave, the network metrics collapse.
• DePIN timing. The Machine Economy thesis is forward-looking. Autonomous machine transactions at scale are years away.
• L1 competition. Solana’s DePIN network is larger and more liquid. General-purpose L1s are adding DePIN capabilities.

Score change log