New Trends in the DePIN Track: Attempts at Integration with AI

DePIN once enjoyed great popularity and many highly regarded projects emerged. With the rapid advancement of AI technology, the market focus has shifted to the AI field. So, what is the current development situation of the DePIN sector?

In fact, the DePIN field is not static; it is seeking new development directions, with the latest trend being the integration with AI technology. In this trend, there is a representative project that deserves our attention.

By analyzing this project, we can gain a specific understanding of the changes occurring in the DePIN track.

1. The Essence of DePIN

DePIN stands for Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network. In simple terms, it is a decentralized hardware network that encourages users to share personal resources through a token incentive mechanism, in order to build an infrastructure network that involves various fields such as storage space, communication bandwidth, cloud computing, and energy.

The core of DePIN lies in resource integration: by incentivizing users to share resources through tokens, resources can efficiently flow to those in need.

DePIN projects are mainly divided into three categories:

1. Storage type: Provides services similar to cloud storage.
2. Computing Power: Decentralized GPU Rendering Platform
3. Network type: Attract global users to participate in the purchase of WIFI devices to form a network through token incentives.

DePIN has similarities with Bitcoin, requiring an initial investment to purchase physical equipment and then ongoing mining. Due to its connection with the physical world, it is not a closed system, bringing positive externalities to the entire industry.

DePIN leverages the paradigm shift of the existing blockchain ecosystem, with a certain high-speed blockchain becoming the preferred platform due to its characteristics. The combination of this blockchain with the DePIN protocol generates powerful synergies.

2. Current Status of the DePIN Market

According to the data, DePIN has nearly 4.56 million devices across approximately 196 countries or regions, with a market value of $7.1 billion. Among them, an emerging project accounts for the largest number of DePIN devices, reaching 1.18 million.

From the perspective of the number of DePIN devices, there are already several giants in this track, but the new leader is the only DePIN project that has not yet issued a token. Ordinary users can still participate now and may have the opportunity to receive airdrop rewards.

The geographical distribution of DePIN devices is also very interesting, mainly concentrated in three regions: the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia. Among them, Southeast Asia has a very high concentration, including India, Vietnam, the Philippines, South Korea, Japan, and others. Among these countries, South Korea has the highest density, showing a strong atmosphere in the South Korean cryptocurrency industry.

Overall, DePIN has brought about a new round of wealth effect, and the Southeast Asian region is fully investing in this track by leveraging its manufacturing and human resource advantages.

3. Introduction to Emerging DePIN Projects

This emerging project belongs to the network segment in DePIN and can be simply defined as a combination of Web3 and WIFI, representing a decentralized wireless network and decentralized telecom operators.

The project offers a variety of product types, initially starting with WIFI hardware, where users can purchase proprietary hardware for mining; it later expanded to eSIM cards, allowing users to apply for eSIM cards and obtain free data by completing various tasks.

Users of the project's app can connect to nearby WiFi networks for free, and by adding WiFi or checking in at WiFi, they can also earn points or eSIM rewards.

In the technical architecture of this project, the telecom data layer is a key concept, serving as the data and service layer of its decentralized physical infrastructure network. This data layer is realized through four main ecological modules: Network, Growth, Discovery, and Community.

The telecommunications data layer of this project provides a new paradigm for the DePIN track. In its future planning, there are mainly two directions: one is to accelerate the implementation of the telecommunications data layer, and the other is to deeply integrate with AI.

4. How Emerging Projects Achieve Integration with AI

The project is integrating with AI, leveraging its own communication data advantages to provide high-quality usable data for AI projects.

AI projects have three key elements: computing power, algorithms, and data. Among them, data is currently the key bottleneck in the AI track, especially communication data, which is currently controlled by traditional telecom operators and is not open.

The innovation of this project lies in addressing one of the most pressing data challenges of AI: the unavailability of carrier-grade data. Users who participate in its network construction receive free eSIM data rewards; when users arrive in any country, the eSIM recharge product allows the data to automatically convert to local data.

The project has opened a channel to provide operator services through Web3 means. In return, the data generated in the process can become a data source for all AI companies, under privacy protection.

The project provides data but does not mean that user privacy will be exposed, as it uses Decentralized Identity (DID) and Verifiable Credentials (VC) technology, combined with Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZK).

The project is actively expanding its service boundaries and ecosystem scope by strategically integrating and connecting multiple DePIN ecosystem partners to jointly build a diverse AI training dataset ecosystem. This multi-party cooperation model not only broadens the sources of data but also enhances the depth of data quality.

The project's data services go far beyond providing basic carrier-level data for AI use; it is building a comprehensive data ecosystem. By engaging in deep collaboration with ecological partners from various fields, the project is able to integrate and provide multidimensional data resources, including but not limited to real-time weather monitoring data, globally distributed CDN service data, renewable energy usage data, decentralized authentication records, and innovative payment and lending behavior data.

It is worth noting that the project can also collect and process behavioral data generated by AI agents during social interactions and payment transactions, as well as operational status information from various intelligent systems, providing comprehensive data support for the training and optimization of AI models.

This diversified data integration capability provides unprecedented data dimensions and depth for training AI models. AI+DePIN is building decentralized infrastructure for the AI era.

5. How ordinary users can participate in DePIN

The core strategies of this project are two: free and airdrop.

Traditional telecom operators charge for data usage, while this decentralized telecom operator provides data to users for free. Users can obtain data by completing tasks, which is very appealing.

On the other hand, purchasing dedicated hardware can accelerate mining, but one can also participate in this project without buying hardware. By simply sharing their Wi-Fi, they can earn points, which allows them to participate in future airdrops, thus significantly lowering the threshold.

Free giveaways and airdrops are powerful tools for Web3 projects, leveraging direct incentives to acquire users and pushing the subsidy wars of the Web2 industry to the extreme. This is also where the opportunity lies for ordinary users.