The Disruptive Future of DePIN
The On-Chain Airbnb for Compute, Bandwidth, and Resources
When people ask me why I’m lit up about DePIN,1 I tell them it’s Airbnb for bandwidth, compute, and power—but the booking engine lives on-chain and anyone can fork it. Fire off one transaction and you recruit a fleet of game servers, a city-block of 5G radios, a canyon of GPUs, and a sunrise worth of solar watts—hardware you don’t own, bills you don’t owe—then pays every operator before you can hit refresh.
Infrastructure-as-code2 just escaped the landlord, and the crowd became the cloud.3
The mesh needs money
The internet has always run on open protocols—TCP/IP for packets, HTTP for pages, SMTP for mail. Those rails let anyone move information, but they require additional layers to pay for it. Every time we wanted to settle a bill we bolted on credit-card forms, PayPal buttons, and SaaS invoices.
That bolt-on business model results in the same incentive loop I called out in Enshittification and the Future of AI Agents: once a platform owns the entire user funnel, it charges rent and breaks interoperability to keep you inside. And at worst, they discontinue software that was mission-critical for your business.
But today’s software isn’t just two browsers chatting like SMTP or HTTP in the 90s—it’s entire multiplayer games, AI copilots, and data pipelines that swallow petabytes. To hit that scale you need fleets of GPUs, massive storage, and global bandwidth on demand. When payment is baked into the same API that discovers those resources, the formula flips: instead of negotiating with a hyperscaler4 for capacity, any qualified operator on the internet can add capacity and earn as the network spreads. In effect, the internet learns to provision itself.
Composability super-charged
Now a coder can stitch together resources (game servers, AI inference engines, file storage, etc.) with a few contract calls. That’s the missing ingredient that shrinks the jump from idea → live product to a weekend hack, even when the product depends on physical infrastructure.
Protocols with integrated payments aren’t just a nicer checkout—they’re the energy that lets DePIN light up at all: value-exchange, compute infrastructure, and intelligence organizing at the speed of an idea, letting tiny teams launch projects that once demanded venture rounds and data-center contracts.
DePIN is a Software Distribution Framework
Most of the emphasis on DePIN is its obvious power to deliver raw compute and hardware devices. But when you combine scalable hardware infrastructure with the payment rails that are inherent in DePIN, there’s another layer of value-add that some networks are beginning to uncover: they’re software delivery networks.
For example, Beamable Network’s technology roadmap includes features to enable creators to deliver backend solutions through an open marketplace, with on-chain reputation and on-chain licensing/royalties. These services snap together in an interoperable framework, letting game studios build games faster—crowdsourcing many of their complicated problems to developers who get paid for helping out.
DePIN Addresses Web2 Demand
Most crypto projects are targeted at crypto-native users. DePIN is different: the supply-side tend to be crypto-native, but the customers of the network (the “demand-side”) can be anyone. DePIN targets already-established demand that exists outside of web3, yet harnesses web3 to deliver a higher-performing, lower-cost and decentralized alternative.
A good example is Beamable Network, a DePIN for gaming backends. Most of the gaming market—over $200B in consumer revenue, which spends $35B+ per year on backend technology—are Web2 and are going to stay Web2 for quite some time. The Beamable SDK makes it easy to provision and scale-up the game servers needed to run a live game without any knowledge of backends, networking or blockchain.
DePIN Scales Nonlinearly
DePIN can scale nonlinearly when it uses a multi-tenanted architecture—meaning that it allows individual nodes to service the compute needs of multiple applications (as opposed to the long-term leasing model favored by bare metal providers and the hyperscalers).
In other words: DePIN turns physical devices into on-chain services that meter usage by the second or by the byte. A hotspot forwarding two kilobytes, a GPU rendering one frame, a home battery pushing out a surplus watt—each action is tiny, constant, and global. The payment layer has to be as programmable and permissionless as the routing layer.
DePIN is Lower Cost
DePIN effectively turns resources like compute into a liquid asset class—similar to what’s happened with energy trading in the modern power grid. Competitive forces mean that datacenters compete for business based on commoditized hardware provisioning, rather than proprietary APIs and long-term contracts intended to lock you in.
Reverse on-chain auctions and order books clear on a continuous basis, pushing margins toward commodity pricing—just like electricity spot markets.
How much lower? Fluence provisions traditional compute resources at 85% less cost than AWS. And Akash reports savings of 50-70% on the provisioning of GPUs.
The Community-owned Future
The first clouds let anyone rent servers; DePIN lets anyone own the cloud’s upside.
By fusing discovery, metering, and payment into one programmable layer, it invites every router, GPU, and solar panel onto an open marketplace—no procurement team required. For builders, that means shipping products at the speed of code rather than capital; for operators, it turns idle hardware into a global revenue stream.
As these networks stitch themselves together, the line between “user” and “infrastructure provider” blurs—and the next wave of software will run on a mesh that literally pays for itself.
Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks. If you’re coming up to speed on the idea, my article Decentralized Gaming Infrastructure gives an overview of the need within the $200B+ videogame market.
Classic IaC was terraform apply → AWS spins up its boxes. DePIN is tx.deploy() → a permissionless swarm provisions itself from the community, proves work, and settles in micropayments. Terraform meets BitTorrent, bankrolled by the community.
“The crowd becomes the cloud” captures beautifully what DePIN is about, but the phrase predates the coinage of DePIN itself. Holo probably gets the credit for originating it, and you’ll likely see the phrase all over the DePINweb at this point.
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform are the big-three “hyperscalers” and account for 59% of global hyperscale capacity. When you add in Meta’s in-house datacenters, these four account for a whopping 44% of all internet backends today.