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 […]
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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 […]
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 […]
A Rough Guide To Helium Mobile
With a couple of hundred Helium IoT and Mobile deployments under our belt, and Mobile fast becoming of serious interest to lots of folks new to the space, we thought we’d quickly lay out how to use the Helium planner to estimate future rewards. If you’d prefer a deeper dive into understanding the HIPs that […]
The DePIN Lifecycle: State of the Art
As a business model, DePINs are new. We have not yet completed a cycle where a project has reached escape velocity, moving from crypto experiment to a real world going concern. We have, however, seen the beginning and probably well past the midpoint of a cycle. While the old proverb goes “You can’t win the […]