Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN) is a rapidly emerging sector with real-world utilities across the tech industry.
According to a Messari report, DePIN is in its earliest growth phase with less than 0.1% market share. Yet It already has a market cap of $50 billion, and over 13 million devices directly contribute to it daily.
DePIN removes centralized intermediaries to offer a direct, efficient, cost-effective, inclusive, and decentralized sharing of physical assets. This translates to a unique crypto incentive-based development and operation of critical infrastructure across computing, AI, wireless technology, sensors, energy, and services.
DePIN’s Emergence in the Tech Sector
Tech companies started embracing DePIN in 2023 when global manufacturers integrated blockchain into real-world infrastructure, leveraged Internet of Things (IoT), and legacy firms like Tesla and Bosch joined in.
Broadly, DePINs can be grouped into Physical Resource Networks and Digital Resource Networks. As the names suggest, the former focuses on devices and hotspots, while the latter focuses on CDNs, VPNs, AI, and specialized computing. Individual device owners connect to the network to share data and earn rewards, while digital networks make computing resources accessible to all.
As a diverse sector, DePIN’s use cases also span across telecommunication networks, data management services, and cloud storage. They disrupt traditional communication networks by expanding coverage to dead spots and provide a secure, scalable alternative to centralized cloud storage.
Further, DePIN has complemented the rise of AI as they’ve fundamentally transformed the functioning of AI-powered machines. DePIN and AI are inherently compatible in multiple ways.
To begin with, AI creates real-world economic value by enabling machines to work as independent agents. Simultaneously, DePIN creates a decentralized ownership and value distribution network, empowering AI device owners to earn revenue from their activities.
DePIN also addresses the problems of traditional centralized computing and helps strengthen and optimize computational power to run energy-intensive AI algorithms. For example, Phoenix, a decentralized AI compute network, is at the forefront of integrating DePIN and AI for real-world use cases.
Phoenix Is Disrupting the DePIN-AI Sector
Phoenix provides a scalable compute network for vertical AI applications and agents with its DePIN-AI infrastructure. SkyNet, Phoenix’s DePIN-powered AI compute layer, is a low-waste, high-utilization network for deploying next-gen industry apps.
SkyNet’s AI node network consists of high-performance, globally distributed NVIDIA and “alternative” non-conventional GPUs for running applications within the Phoenix ecosystem. On the high-powered side, Phoenix is one of the first in the space to run LLMs (namely Deepseek R1) on Huawei 910B GPUs. Additionally, SkyNet has AI compute devices for all sorts of tasks — the lightweight and cost-efficient PhoenixNodes, built on non-NVIDIA-based Hailo infrastructure, offer edge computing for (small language models) and AI machine vision apps.
Phoenix has leveraged DePIN infrastructure to deploy customized AI and computing solutions across crypto markets, trading apps, generative AI, and Decentralized Science (DeSci).
For instance, Phoenix’s AlphaNet provides AI-driven market insights, trading models, trading agents, customizable market strategies for risk-adjusted returns, and scalable AI quantitative trading. On the other hand, Phoenix GenAI helps gaming and metaverse companies, NFT protocols, and content creators to leverage the turnkey creation of generative AI content for images, videos, and 3D models.
Phoenix is also helping computational biosciences and AI drug discovery by deploying state-of-the-art AI and computing models like AlphaFold 2 for scientific research and other DeSci projects. To this end, Phoenix has recently partnered with AI drug discovery firm, TandemAI.
The collaboration between Phoenix TandemAI would enable a lightweight version of the latter to run on SkyNet. This will empower research organizations, science labs, and pharmaceutical companies to use a resource-intensive system at zero cost and scale effectively without incurring high charges.
Phoenix has also partnered with China’s leading quantum computing firm, Origin Quantum, to integrate its 72-qubit superconducting quantum chip and democratize quantum computing and make it more accessible by reducing overhead developmental costs and deployment complexity.
Origin Quantum’s collaboration with Phoenix will help researchers, engineers, and developers build functions, do calculations, and deploy applications through a simplified API. Further, a web-based quantum computing terminal built on the Quantum Virtual Machine (QuantumVM) will allow users to execute functions without learning quantum programming.
Phoenix collaborating with industry-leading firms appears to mark uncharted waters utilizing its novel AI and compute infrastructure.
According to Messari’s research, DePIN’s total addressable market is projected to reach $3.5 trillion by 2028. Meanwhile, Gartner analysts have predicted that 80% of companies will use AI by 2026. Consequently, the DePIN-AI sector is set for a massive boom in the coming years.
Companies like Phoenix are set to lead the DePIN-AI innovation cycle by combining decentralized infrastructure and computing to build real-world industry use cases.
