Understanding DePIN
Decentralised Physical Infrastructure (DePIN) - inspired by a conversation with Jamie Milne
by Timothy Coleman - 22/Mar/2024
DePIN
Finally there is a word to talk about something I’ve been trying to articulate for years: DePIN. I would often hear claims that “Our Web3 game is FULLY ON CHAIN”, and I would really struggle to get an answer to whether this included the Physical Infrastructure.
It took a while to realise that ‘FULLY ON CHAIN’ meant that a lot of these games were just integrating their assets as NFTS, and that, in fact, their ‘compute’ was being done by AWS and not by a physically decentralised network of computers ‘doing work’..
Predictions
I believe that we will soon see a surge of companies claiming to be the next big thing in using decentralised networks for compute (maybe in response to this claim by Sam Altman on the importance of ‘compute’).
Many of these companies will claim that their ‘DePIN’ solution is ‘on chain’, when what they actually mean is that it is decentralised (‘on a blockchain’ means that you are creating and maintaining a ledger using a network of geographically spread out machines)*.
Marketing
The emergence of new terminology such as ‘DePIN’ is very helpful for helping us as a tech community to understand each other and to be able to talk about things with people from a non-technical background. Get in touch if you need help with comms.
With over 10 years of experience working with startups at the technical level, one of our main offerings at Unegma is to offer consulting services aimed at helping both startups and established companies with cross functional communication.
- disclaimer: if you have a Digital Token based incentivisation system in place for paying nodes contributing their compute, then fine, you can say you have a ‘blockchain’ element to your system, but blockchains aren’t needed for decentralisation (decentralisation is needed for blockchains).