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 […]
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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. […]
Designing for Profligate Perfection
One useful way to think about DePINs is what you might learn by considering an example from Nature. The growth structure of a well formed DePIN reflects a common pattern in Nature; profligate seeding. One seahorse will give birth to 2,000 babies, a common octopus will lay 100,000 to 200,000 eggs at one time, and […]