DePIN
Decentralised Physical Infrastructure Networks. Protocols that use token incentives to coordinate real-world physical infrastructure like GPU compute, wireless networks, storage, mapping sensors, or bandwidth.
Also known as: Decentralised Physical Infrastructure, DePIN network
DePIN is the umbrella category for protocols that replace centralised infrastructure with token-incentivised distributed networks. Helium incentivises people to run wireless hotspots. Hivemapper incentivises drivers to mount cameras and collect street-level imagery. Filecoin incentivises hard drives to provide decentralised storage. Render, io.net, Akash, and Aethir incentivise GPU owners to share compute. Grass incentivises people to share their unused home bandwidth. Each network turns a previously-centralised industry into a token-coordinated marketplace where supply comes from individuals rather than a single operator.
The economic pitch for DePIN is simple: real-world infrastructure is expensive to build centrally, and there are millions of underused hardware assets already deployed that could contribute if there was a way to pay them proportionally to their contribution. Tokens solve the payment coordination problem. A DePIN network can pay 10,000 small contributors weekly without any of them needing a bank account or a contract with the protocol operator. In theory, this creates networks that are cheaper, more resilient, and more geographically distributed than centralised alternatives.
The practical reality is more complicated. Most DePIN networks are heavily subsidised by token emissions in their early years: contributors earn tokens whether or not there’s real demand for the service. That’s fine as a bootstrap strategy, but it only works if the network eventually develops real revenue to pay contributors from. Networks that never make that transition are structurally just printing tokens and calling it infrastructure. Akash is one of the few DePIN networks that has genuinely transitioned toward fee-funded operation (via AEP-76 and the burn-mint equilibrium model). Most others are still emission-dependent.
Almost every DeAI compute project is also a DePIN project, which is why the two categories overlap so much in OYM’s coverage. The overlap matters for the Freedom Score: a DeAI project that’s also a DePIN inherits all the DePIN incentive questions (is demand real, are suppliers earning enough to keep participating, does the token have a path to fee-funding) on top of the DeAI-specific questions (is the AI component actually decentralised, who controls model selection, is privacy real). Both sets of questions need answering before a project earns a meaningful score on either axis.