Decentralized Physical Infrastructure (DePIN) uses blockchain technology to allow users to take ownership of their data.
Tokens encourage users to provide services in the real world using physical infrastructure and systems. A popular example of a DePIN project today is Helium, a wireless Internet of Things (IoT) network.
According to Scott Sigel, the chief operating officer of the Helium Foundation, anyone can purchase a helium-compatible gateway – similar to a traditional WiFi hotspot in regular homes – and install it around their property or in commercial spaces.
Read more: Unlimited Helium Mobile cell plan is available nationwide for $20 per month
Once installed, these hotspots will allow community members to access wireless coverage in their neighborhood or general area. Those who take care of the hotspot themselves will also be rewarded with tokens that they can cash out.
“The economics of building an IoT network have historically been difficult, and many centralized providers have gone out of business in the process,” Sigel said.
Sigel explains that Helium started a decade ago and quickly realized that from a centralized perspective, it was extremely expensive to maintain real estate costs and install networks as it built out its IoT network.
“This is something that is at the heart of DePIN: how do you coordinate work in the physical world and leverage community to create physical infrastructure?” he said.
In 2019, Helium launched its decentralized mobile network and quickly expanded its coverage globally. According to the Helium Explorer, there are currently 392,090 hotspots around the world.
Read more: Helium hotspots go live to make Miami network profitable
Sigel notes that mobile users, regardless of which network they use, are at the mercy of major telecommunications companies who determine where coverage will be deployed. With Helium, individuals and small businesses have the opportunity to solve the problem.
“My favorite example is: there is a company in Portugal where Helium IoT coverage is very dense, and they were talking to the city of Porto about early flood detection, the fact that they could build businesses and a solution for the city could offer. , completely dependent on the coverage built by the helium community and the people of Porto, speaks to the success of the company running entirely on community-hosted infrastructure,” said Sigel.
Helium currently runs on the Solana blockchain, a decision Sigel noted was made due to the high-performance nature of the network, which can handle high throughput, and its large developer ecosystem.
Read more: Helium token holders approve the move to Solana blockchain
“Solana’s speed performance, coupled with their principles around intuitive frontend, were just some of the things that overlapped and made sense to us. This is something that happened through a community vote,” he said.
Besides Helium, another DePIN project being built on Solana and gaining traction is Hivemapper, which aims to completely revolutionize the card industry.
According to Gabe Nelson, head of operations and marketing at Hivemapper, the company’s founder and CEO, Ariel Seidman, worked in the mapping industry for more than two decades. During this time, a major problem that Seidman hoped to solve was finding ways to create maps in a cost-effective, scalable way.
The current process of road mapping requires street view vehicles with sensors driving down every street, which is both labor and capital intensive, creating a huge barrier to entry into the mapping market.
“Crypto tokens were a way to align the incentives of a large community to build something together and build it to the scale it needs to reach to compete with the existing infrastructure incumbents,” Nelson said. “I don’t know of any other financial system that offers this kind of functionality.”
According to the Hivemapper Explorer, there are currently over 130,000 contributors across 3,253 regions. More than 11,231,955 kilometers have been mapped, which covers about 19% of the entire globe so far.