Glossary
DePIN
Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network: a protocol that uses on-chain incentives to coordinate real-world hardware (wireless, storage, GPU, sensors, energy).
DePIN is the umbrella term for protocols where token incentives bootstrap real-world infrastructure: wireless networks (Helium), mapping (Hivemapper), storage (Filecoin, Arweave), GPU compute (Render, Akash, io.net), wireless data, energy grids, and more.
The model: contributors run hardware, perform verifiable work, and earn tokens for it; users pay tokens for service. The tokens are the bootstrapping subsidy that lets the network reach the scale at which usage fees alone could sustain it. Whether each network ever crosses that threshold is the central open question.