Accelerating Innovation in the DePIN Sector

Jasper De Maere: Why DePIN Is Taking Off Now

For about four years now, I’ve been a veteran in the DePIN community. However, some of the businesses I’ve talked about earlier have been operational since before the sector was even labeled (starting from 2017)! This gives us a distinctive viewpoint on the industry, understanding what strategies have proven effective and what hasn’t, and crucially, the critical components of the tech infrastructure that every DePIN founder must construct to achieve success. Today, let’s delve into one of the essentials – the map explorer tool.

For each DePIN project, it’s essential to have a tool that displays the count and location of devices, token value and trading volume, on-chain earnings, and other critical statistics. Traditionally, every DePIN has had to develop this tool independently, which encompasses work on smart contracts, backends, and frontends and can take several months. This process is highly inefficient as the underlying technology for this part of the stack is largely consistent across all DePIN projects. Fortunately, Hotspotty, EV3, IoTeX, and DePIN Pulse have stepped up to offer assistance.

The DePIN Hub by Hotspotty offers profile pages for DePIN project creators, emphasizing project descriptions, social sentiment, and community expansion. It also showcases recent media coverage from external sources such as podcasts, in addition to details about token pricing and trading volume. Essentially, the DePIN Hub serves as a platform where founders can share their journey of initiating and growing their projects.

DePIN.Ninja, a tool by EV3, functions as the standard on-chain tracker for DePINs in the industry. It offers project profile pages featuring links to their social media, recent podcast appearances, and total funds raised. DePIN.Ninja simplifies the process for founders to transparently display financial data to investors and the public alike.

IoTeX’s DePINscan serves as the primary resource for exploring the DePIN ecosystem. It offers an array of sector-wide statistics, such as total market capitalization, trading volume, and device count, in addition to custom project profiles that detail the number and geographical locations of devices. Furthermore, it provides miner-focused metrics like device cost, earnings, and payback period. DePINscan effectively narrates the achievements of DePIN (as well as individual projects within it) to date and offers a current overview of the industry’s landscape.

The DePIN’s DePIN Pulse platform isn’t up and running just yet, but it will offer a space where DePIN projects can showcase their mining earnings possibilities and foster connections for supply-side providers as well. This tool allows project founders to directly connect with potential contributors and maximize the value of their proposal.

Thanks to these tools, a DePIN founder’s life has become significantly easier. Now, they can effortlessly submit their projects for consideration, seamlessly connect their backends, and almost instantly create profile pages that serve as their virtual homes, showcasing their data, and directing investors and contributors. The ease of aggregating and disseminating data through these tools is advantageous for the entire DePIN community as well. These tools have noticeably reduced the time-to-market for DePIN founders and increased their visibility not only within the sector but also across the broader crypto landscape.

DePIN represents one of crypto’s best chances to meaningfully impact the world in a positive way. It represents a novel method of capital formation and a new, more equitable way to build physical infrastructure. If (any of) these ideas work, the fabric of society will be changed forever. While the sector has come a long way since last cycle and there is a palpable excitement in the air given the number and quality of projects being funded and launched, there is still much work to be done. Commoditizing the map explorer part of the DePIN tech stack increases the pace and ease with which DePINs can be created because, after all, the more experimentation we can encourage here, the more innovation will undoubtedly occur. And that’s something we can all agree is worth fighting for.

Keep in mind that the opinions presented in this article belong solely to the writer; they may not align with the perspectives of CoinDesk Inc., its proprietors, or its associates.