As the DePIN market matures, the ways that projects approach the market are solidifying into three channels. First is the solution-seeking-problem (SSP) method: DePINs are new and exciting, so someone will come up with an idea for how distributed hardware would make something better, but there’s no clear market for the generated data. SSPs are […]
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False Security In A Cryptographic Chip
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 […]