Cryptographic chips on DePIN miners are commonly thought to prove that the data from a miner is “good”. They don’t actually do that. They just prove that the data came from a specific miner. Slapping the word “cryptographic” on something doesn’t mean it’s automatically safer. As GNSS expert Dr. Todd Humphreys has shown in Detection […]
Solving The Impossible Problem: An Anti-Gaming Primer
by Matthew Patrick, Nik Hawks, and Max Gold The glorious possibility of a DePIN, that of gathering a group of strangers together to achieve something far greater than any fraction of them could achieve, carries with it an inherent burden: Some people cheat. That’s not to say all people are immoral, or even that most […]
Hex Boosting: A Tale of Two Projects
We are now emerging into a third season of DePINs. The first season was entirely Helium, demonstrating how token incentives could drive the rapid build out of a global network. The second season was marked by the explosion of follow-ons like Hivemapper, DIMO, and WeatherXM, all of them using the core concept of decentralized physical […]
Do You Need to Cluster?
Think of cluster incentives as the opposite of the heat death of the universe. Heat death is a theoretical end-state in which the universe has flat-lined. All energy is evenly distributed, every star has burned out, there are no hot spots. It’s all the same. Boring. Cluster incentives serve the opposite goal, driving high value […]
The Evolution of Control
It’s a common mistake to think that DePINs, or Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks, are decentralized at birth. The great hope of all DePINs is to come up with a network that doesn’t have centralized control, where fairness is baked in and anyone willing to pay a market-set price can participate without asking a single by-your-leave. […]