peaq

peaq review: the verdict

peaq is a well-built Layer-1 for machine identity and payments, and it hosts a broad roster of DePIN projects and enterprise pilots. The chain earns almost nothing from that activity: its gas take is a rounding error against its emissions, so holders are paid in new tokens rather than in fees. Nearly half the token allocation went to insiders, a six-member council runs governance, and the chain depends on keeping its Polkadot slot. It scores low on both Freedom and Returns, a credible machine-economy bet that has yet to turn usage into value.

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. peaq’s Q3 2025 report puts performance 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.Block in the glossary → finalisation, 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. Its Kusama canary network, krest, has been retired: peaq’s node repository removed the krest runtime in September 2026 (PR #397), stating the network is decommissioned, and krest’s public RPC endpoint no longer answers.

Value proposition

Network 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.DePIN in the glossary → 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.Training in the glossary →)
• 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. peaq’s Q3 2025 report counts 40.4 million transactions for the quarter.

The counter-narrative is simple: activity without monetisation. Sixty DePINs, millions of users, enterprise logos, and the chain itself takes in roughly 429.9 thousand PEAQ a year in gas on our own sampling of its EVM layer. That is a floor rather than a total, and it still earns the chain 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.TVL in the glossary → 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.L1 in the glossary → chain.

It is worth separating the two layers, because they get quoted as one number and they belong to different people. Gas is what peaq earns. Fees on MachineX, the busiest application on the chain, are what MachineX earns, and at about $268.1K a year they are the larger of the two by a wide margin. Counting them as peaq’s revenue would credit a landlord with his tenant’s takings.

The Machine Economy thesis is directionally correct. Machines will increasingly need to transact. The question is timing. On the evidence of what anyone actually pays to use the chain, the answer for 2026 is 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.Slot in the glossary →. 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 is 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.Wallet in the glossary →, 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 purpose-built and well-engineered. The 60+ DePINs are working projects building shipping applications. But what anyone actually pays to use the chain tells you the Machine Economy is still ahead of the market. The infrastructure is ready. The machines are not yet transacting at scale.

robotic.sh: services behind peaqOS

robotic.sh is peaq’s own market for services a machine can call through peaqOS. On 24 September 2026 it listed 20 services, 14 marked Ready and 6 marked Setup, where the operator must configure credentials first. Two recent additions show where the edges are:

• Allora (announced 3 September 2026). A machine can read Allora’s collective inferences free and keyless, or register as an Allora inference worker. The worker leg is operator-paid: the operator registers from its own wallet, and peaqOS verifies the transaction but signs nothing. The adapter page quotes a 50,000,000 uallo fee, which is Allora’s testnet parameter; the mainnet chain’s registration_fee reads 1 ALLO.
• World ID (announced 21 August 2026). A machine can check a zero-knowledge proof that a person holds a World ID without learning who they are. It’s listed as Setup, since the operator must first create and run its own World app.

peaq’s Allora post calls machines autonomous “without human intervention”, which the adapter page supports for the read leg only, and its Unitree G1 humanoid demo was simulated in NVIDIA’s Isaac Sim. Neither route pays peaq anything visible: Allora reads are free, worker fees go to Allora, and World ID checks run through World’s own API.

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.Liquidity in the glossary → 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.DeFi in the glossary → 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.Validator in the glossary → 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.Model in the glossary → 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.Inflation in the glossary → and decreasing by 10% each year until it stabilises at 1% (approximately 12 years post-launch).

The scheduled rate for Year 2 is ~3.15%. peaq’s tokenomics documentation describes no 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.Burn in the glossary → of transaction fees, and issued supply read on chain sits within about a month’s emissions of that schedule, so dilution is running at the nominal rate. The VEO programme manages how early-investor tokens reach the market, which spreads sell pressure without reducing supply.

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.Vesting in the glossary →
• 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.Cliff in the glossary →, 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.Circulating Supply in the glossary → is a little over half of the current ~4.44 billion total supply (grown from the 4.2 billion genesis via disinflationary emissions). The insider allocation (Core Team 11.5% + EoT Labs 8.5% + Pre-Seed 7% + Seed 5% + Private Sale 13% = 45%) is heavy.

Two things changed on the supply side in the window to 5 September 2026, both read from peaq’s own tokenomics documentation. The Economics 2.0 contracts went live on mainnet on 1 September: machines now activate on USD-priced subscription tiers and bond PEAQ at the oracle rate, and those bonds sit in the MachineSubscription contract and count as circulating supply. A lapsed bond decays over fourteen days, half to burn and half to treasury, except that peaq’s docs state the burn address in InfoDesk is unset, so the burn half reduces nothing today. Anyone describing peaq as burning PEAQ on lapsed bonds is describing intent.

The second is a consolidation rather than a mechanism. On 28 August the Community Reserve (186,354,098 PEAQ) and the Security Reserve (46,362,265 PEAQ) each sent their full balance to the Ecosystem and Treasury Reserve and are now empty, and a further 36,558,287 PEAQ left that reserve on 1 September against a stated purpose of “to be confirmed”. Two separately-labelled pools folding into the team-controlled one does not change the total, but it does concentrate roughly 845 million PEAQ, about a fifth of supply, behind a single label with one recent outflow the project has not yet explained. The block-reward change announced alongside it has since gone live: the chain runs runtime spec 113 on a 24 September 2026 read.

peaq’s docs describe the new split as 70% to the treasury and 30% to validators and delegators. The reward pallet’s Sinks storage, read on 24 September 2026, divides block rewards four ways:

• 30% to the staking pot for validators and delegators
• 30% to EVM contract 0x9e37…3895
• 20% to the treasury pallet (py/trsry)
• 20% to EVM contract 0x7088…e92a

The two EVM contracts take half of block rewards between them, and the docs’ 70/30 description doesn’t account for them.

Until spec 113 the split was 40% to validators and delegators, 25% to the General Treasury, 20% to the DePIN Incentive Pool, 10% to the Security Treasury (coretime) and 5% to the Machine Subsidisation Pool. The docs record that the DePIN Incentive Pool and the other legacy pools no longer receive block rewards.

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.Token in the glossary → is down more than 90% from its all-time high of December 2024, a month after launch. 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.Staking in the glossary → 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.DEX in the glossary →) to strengthen on-chain liquidity. All transactions execute on-chain through smart contracts. No backroom deals. peaq reported that 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 fresh 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. Binance carries no PEAQ spot pair against any quote asset as of 6 September 2026. Live price and volume data is displayed above.

How to participate

Stake PEAQ. Delegate tokens to validators via DPoS. 30% of block rewards go to validators and delegators under runtime spec 113. 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. The DePIN Incentive Pool no longer receives block rewards under runtime spec 113; grants are available. Technical skill: advanced. This is the participation method that grows the network.

Honest assessment

What works. The engineering is solid and open: SDKs in three languages, audited core code, self-sovereign machine identities, and a published four-phase path to on-chain governance. peaq has also done the business development most DePIN chains skip, with enterprise names attached to pilots.

What doesn’t work yet. Monetisation. Usage figures are large and fees are tiny, and MachineX, the busiest application, earns more than the chain it runs on. Until fees or a burn start to offset emissions, the token’s returns rest on staking inflation, which pays holders in more of the same token.

Freedom Score: 52/100

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

Infrastructure Decentralisation: 11/20. Polkadot parachain with DPoS/NPoS, secured by Relay Chain validators. peaq reports 49K TPS. Parachain dependency means peaq lacks independent sovereignty, and its liveness depends on maintaining a Polkadot slot. Enterprise focus suggests some centralisation in key relationships.

The collator set is small and concentrated: 31 candidates for 42 slots, so selection is uncontested, and 3 collators hold over a third of backing. The top ten held 74.8% of backing on a 24 September 2026 read, and collators had posted about 0.18% of the stake behind them, with the rest delegated. That measurement is why peaq’s claim to “the highest Nakamoto Coefficients” in the industry is graded inflated on the integrity board: it holds only for the Polkadot Relay Chain, which peaq doesn’t operate.

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.DAO in the glossary → 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.Parameters in the glossary → (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 58% circulating after ~22 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. 100 public GitHub repos, 43 of them peaq’s own and the rest forks (GitHub API, 18 September 2026), 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: 46/100

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.Gas in the glossary → 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 broad on-chain usage.

Value Accrual: 9/20. Transaction fees paid in PEAQ (gas). 30% of block rewards go to validators and delegators under runtime spec 113 (40% before it), and the DePIN Incentive Pool no longer receives any. 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.

The gas the chain collects is a rounding error against its own emissions: our own sampling of peaq’s EVM layer puts it at roughly 429.9 thousand PEAQ a year, and that is a floor rather than a total. Value accrual therefore rests on staking inflation, which pays holders in more of the same token rather than in anything the network earned.

Supply Dynamics: 9/20. No max supply. Inflation started at 3.5%, is scheduled at ~3.15% in Year 2, and trends toward 1% over 12 years. The earlier 10 leaned on a fee burn said to cut effective inflation to ~2.5%, and that burn has no source: peaq’s docs describe no fee burn and record the InfoDesk burn address as unset. So dilution runs at the scheduled rate.

58% circulating after ~22 months is reasonable progress, and insider vesting is documented with cliffs and linear schedules. The VEO programme through Lucid Finance manages early investor exits through discounted vested sales (12.5% discount, 3-month vesting) and channels 10% of proceeds into on-chain liquidity, though it leaves total supply unchanged. A little under half of supply remains locked or vesting.

Revenue Sustainability: 7/25. Reported usage is high: peaq counts 40.4 million transactions in Q3 2025, 60+ DePINs and 6M+ machines and people on-chain. Enterprise partnerships (NTT, Continental, Airbus, Bosch) suggest commercial traction. Monetisation is where it comes apart, and the fees divide into two layers that are worth keeping apart.

The chain earns roughly 429.9 thousand PEAQ a year in EVM gas, on our own count of every EVM block in a day, annualised: with traffic this bursty that is an order-of-magnitude estimate rather than a precise figure, and it still rounds to nothing against emissions. Token Terminal, which sees the Substrate side our EVM read cannot, puts its chain fees near $19,000 for the trailing year. MachineX, the busiest application on peaq, is a better-looking number and it belongs to MachineX: about $268.1K a year at the current run-rate, down from a peak month of $166.4K in October 2025. Neither layer covers 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.Emissions in the glossary →, and the one that is growing is the token supply.

Liquidity & Access: 6/15. Listed on Kraken, KuCoin, Gate.io, MEXC, Bitget and Crypto.com, among others. Binance carries no PEAQ spot pair at all as of 6 September 2026, against any quote asset, so the main-spot listing this review has carried since January 2026 cannot be confirmed and is withdrawn. Depth is thin and evenly spread, with the largest venue near a seventh of the flow. Adequate for small-to-medium positions. Liquidity & Access +1 (to 7) was a candidate on the strength of that Binance listing and the July 2026 review denied it on thin, venue-concentrated post-listing turnover. With no Binance spot pair now visible, the candidate is closed on its premise as well as on its evidence.

PEAQ has also traded on Solana since 8 September 2026, per the Sunrise gateway’s asset list, through an SPL mint that peaq’s token page names and a single Raydium PEAQ/USDC pool on DexScreener. A read of that mint on 24 September 2026 found about 22.1M PEAQ, roughly 0.5% of issued supply, so the Solana leg is too small to move this score.

peaqOS reaches Solana as well: peaq’s documentation describes machines homed on Solana, with the identity and Machine NFT held as Solana accounts and the bond held on peaq. New Solana onboarding is paused for now. peaq’s own peaqOS assistant repository says an upgrade broke Solana onboarding in CLI 0.0.13 and sends operators to a peaq home instead (merged 1 October 2026).

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 a chain that collects a rounding error in gas. The network is broad but not deep in commercial terms.
• Token collapse. Down more than 90% from its December 2024 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.ATH in the glossary →. 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

Date	Score	Change	Reason
2026-10-13	Data	N/A	EVM gas index now counts every block in a day instead of sampling four windows, which had missed the bursts; the figure roughly tripled and the claim that most fees settle outside the EVM was dropped. Scores unchanged.
2026-10-07	Data	N/A	Added peaqOS on Solana as peaq documents it, with new Solana onboarding paused since an upgrade broke it, per peaq’s own repo. Scores unchanged.
2026-10-04	Data	N/A	Removed the claim that peaq still runs the krest canary network: peaq’s node repo deleted the krest runtime on 7 Sep 2026 (PR #397), calling the network decommissioned, and its RPC no longer answers. Scores unchanged.
2026-09-27	Editorial	N/A	Added a review verdict up top and filled the empty Honest assessment section; new seoTitle and description. No score change.
2026-09-25	Score	Freedom 53 → 52, Returns 47 → 46 (D held)	Infrastructure 12 → 11: 33 collators for 42 slots, the top ten at 74.8%, four holding a third. Supply Dynamics 10 → 9: the burn behind the old ~2.5% inflation has no source, so dilution runs at the scheduled ~3.15%.
2026-09-24	Data	N/A	Runtime spec 113 is live: block rewards now pay 30% to staking (was 40%), per an on-chain read of the reward sinks. The ~2.5% “effective inflation with burn” had no source; peaq’s docs describe no fee burn, so Year 2 is shown at the scheduled ~3.15%. Collator-set, repo-count, ATH and self-reported usage lines re-sourced. Scores unchanged.
2026-09-24	Data	N/A	robotic.sh additions noted: an Allora adapter (free keyless reads, operator-paid worker registration) and World ID, listed as operator-configured Setup. Scores unchanged.
2026-09-24	Data	N/A	Solana venue added via the Sunrise gateway (8 Sep 2026): about 22.1M PEAQ on the Solana mint, roughly 0.5% of issued supply, in one Raydium pool. Liquidity & Access 6/15 held.
2026-09-23	Data	N/A	Integrity records re-cut: 3 claims now quote peaq’s own pages verbatim and 7 are our own measurements. Scores unchanged.
2026-09-07	Data	N/A	WS3b supply rail: issued supply read on chain (Balances.TotalIssuance) sits above the 4.2B our tokenomics carried, which was the genesis figure. peaq has no max supply, so a percentage quoted against genesis drifts upward on its own. 28.35% of issued supply is bonded. Supply Dynamics 10/20 held.
2026-09-07	Data	N/A	WS3b consensus rail: collator selection is uncontested, with fewer candidates than slots, so entry is genuinely open and there is no competitive pressure or spare capacity. Collators post a fraction of a percent of stake; the rest is delegated. Censorship 8/15 held.
2026-09-06	Data	N/A	Research JSON resynced to the frontmatter Returns breakdown. Revenue Sustainability 8 predates the 2026-09-05 move to 7, and Supply Dynamics 9 predates a March 2026 move to 10 that no log row names. No published score changed.
2026-09-06	Data	N/A	WS3b liquidity rail: Binance carries no PEAQ spot pair against any quote asset, so the main-spot listing asserted since January 2026 is withdrawn from all three surfaces; whether it was ever listed and later removed was not established. The other six venues confirm. Liquidity & Access 6/15 held.
2026-09-05	Data	N/A	Economics 2.0 live on mainnet 1 Sep 2026 (machine bonds in MachineSubscription, counted as circulating), with peaq’s own docs recording the InfoDesk burn address as unset, so the lapsed-bond burn reduces nothing yet. The 70/30 block-reward split is merged but awaits spec 113. Token Utility +1 candidate deferred to October: four days is too little to score.
2026-09-05	Data	N/A	Community Reserve (186,354,098 PEAQ) and Security Reserve (46,362,265 PEAQ) emptied into the Ecosystem and Treasury Reserve on 28 Aug 2026, with 36,558,287 PEAQ leaving it on 1 Sep against an unstated purpose. Total unchanged; concentration behind one team-controlled label is the Token Distribution Fairness question, flagged for October.
2026-09-05	Returns	Revenue Sustainability 8 → 7 (Returns 48 → 47, D held)	Executes the decision of 2026-08-17. The dimension rested on “$163.6K annualised fees, per DeFiLlama”, which Token Terminal put nearer $19K for the trailing year, so the move is what an ~8x overstatement is worth within an unchanged band. Circulating also refreshed ~50% to ~56%.
2026-08-17	Data	N/A	Estimator corrected. The EVM gas index stored the median of sampled window rates; fees are a flow, so the unbiased estimator is the mean, and the median understated by up to 4x by discarding the bursts that carry the volume. Figure re-read and qualified as an order of magnitude.
2026-08-17	Data	N/A	Token Terminal recovered: chain fees read ~$100K all-time and ~$19K over the trailing year, peaking near $19.7K a month in March 2025. Our EVM sampling is ~6% of that, which sizes the Substrate leg it cannot see at ~94% of fees. DeFiLlama’s adapter is the outlier by three orders of magnitude. Score flagged for September.
2026-08-17	Data	N/A	Chain fees graded unverifiable. A direct read of peaq’s own EVM RPC measured $1.70-$10.40 a day in gas, against the $0.01 a day DeFiLlama reports, so the one refreshable source undercounts by roughly two orders of magnitude. The measured figure is itself only a floor, since it cannot see Substrate-side DePIN traffic.
2026-08-17	Data	N/A	The “$163.6K annualised fees, per DeFiLlama” figure is retired. It conflated two layers: gas paid to peaq, and fees earned by MachineX, a DEX built on peaq. They are now reported separately and bound to a live index. Scores unchanged pending the September review.
2026-08-12	Data	N/A	WS3 open-source verdict added (1->2). peaq-network-node (Substrate parachain) is Apache-2.0, 100-repo org, active (match). Independent supply read deferred: native PEAQ needs a Subscan key or raw Substrate decode. Scores unchanged.
2026-07-01	Data	N/A	July monthly review resolves the deferred Liquidity & Access +1 (Binance listing) candidate: DENIED and closed. Post-listing turnover did not sustain: 24h volume ~$1.1M and BitMart-concentrated (CoinGecko 2026-07-01), no Binance pair leading current liquidity. Held at 6/15, no score change.
2026-06-02	Data	N/A	June monthly review. Circulating refreshed 1.86B (44.3% of genesis) → ~2.21B (~50% of the current ~4.41B total) per CoinGecko, reflecting continued disinflationary emissions and unlocks; denominator switched from genesis-4.2B to current-total for accuracy. “No max supply” unchanged (CoinGecko’s listed max ~5.67B is a projection artifact). Score unchanged. Next unlock ~12 June 2026 (~1.9%). Liquidity & Access +1 (Binance listing) still held pending post-listing volume.
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2026-08-15	Data	N/A	Circulating supply de-hardcoded and bound. The stated ~50% was 4.4pp stale against 54.44% of total supply.
2026-05-27	Editorial	N/A	Initial Machine Offerings (IMOs) launched via CoinList on 14 May 2026, framework for tokenising physical machines (robots, sensors, vehicles) as RWAs through peaqOS. Liquidity & Access score adjustment already flagged for June review (2026-05-03 row, candidate 6→7); IMO partnership doesn’t move the dial on the broader $163.6K annualised fees gap. No score change.
2026-05-03	Editorial	N/A	Binance main spot listing (January 2026) corrected; article previously said “Binance Alpha only”. Liquidity & Access score adjustment (6 to 7 candidate) deferred to June review.
2026-04-06	Data	N/A	Quarterly review. Inflation updated from ~3.15% to ~2.5% effective (burn mechanism). Governance roadmap and VEO already reflected. Verified against primary sources. Scores unchanged.
2026-03-12	Both	N/A	March 2026 refresh. VEO programme added, Q3 2025 transaction data updated. Scores unchanged.
2025-03-06	Both	N/A	Initial publish. Freedom 50/100, Returns 48/100.