It's hard to not get caught up in another wild goose chase in hopes of getting the long-dreamed “crypto mass adoption.”
We saw this at a great length with the Metaverse, so much that Big Tech wanted an immediate piece of it, seeing Facebook quickly rebranding to Meta was peak marketing for the industry.
The problem?
The world was not quite ready for a virtual world of that scale, people barely understood blockchain - which has to be the underlying metaverse tech - so adopting something birthed off the idea of a more interconnected world with non-central systems of data management comes with a great deal of complexity layers, not to mention that most companies that actually pursued this had no intention of building something that unique, it was all a race to capture a consumer base that wasn't yet ready for that much content.
DePINs, to which I've talked about in the past in respect to smart cities, appear to be a growing narrative in crypto these days.
The attention seems to be slowly moving past the Metaverse and “web3” as it becomes more and more clear that web3 isn't something you build, rather, the actualization of it is a direct outcome of everything else we build in this space.
You don't build web3, it's a reward we get for building open-source and decentralized data infrastructures.
It took a while for us to get here, but it's great that people are now understanding that “web3” is a concept, not a thing in need of a central body to build.
DePINs as stage 2 to achieving web3?
Stage one was achieving “blockchain” itself, now it seems that DePINs will be stage 2 to achieving a decentralized web.
Why? Why? Why?
First off, to satisfy the topic of this article, DePINs are not necessarily a buzzword when we compare the use of it to web3 in project marketing campaigns.
It's easy to call anything web3 and not thrive to prove it to consumers or investors, this made web3 a comical pursuit and this caused pro-centralized systems advocates to laugh at us.
Now, when it comes to DePINs, it's rather more difficult to slap the phrase onto a project without actually having a product that satisfies it.
Funny enough, DePINs are not a new concept, it just only seems like it recently got the fancy name(or got the spotlight more) as we've had projects building on this concept at least from a year ago.
E.g Filecoin, Graph Protocol, etc.
That said, why do I think DePINs are stage 2 to achieving web3?
Okay, what are DePINs?
DePINs, or Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks, represent a shift from traditional centralized systems to a decentralized model where physical infrastructure and resources are distributed across a network of nodes. Each node contributes resources like storage space or computing power, which are then managed and utilized through blockchain technology. This approach enhances reliability, privacy, and efficiency, as there is no single point of failure.
Damn, GPT, I could swear I'd only need to get rid of the phrase DePINs and rephrase a few words and I'd be defining web3.
The very definition of DePINs exposes that they are an essential layer to achieving a decentralized web.
The reason Big Tech is big is because they have physical infrastructure and resources at an extensive level. Resources like storage at an extensive level enables vast data capture, to which they can analyze and build out products that lure in a huge network of consumers.
We cannot have a decentralized web if at the end of the day, we lack these resources at an extensive level. To have a decentralized web, we need to have a decentralized hosting provider and domain management system and that requires extensive resources.
We need a vastly distributed network of storage and computational resources.
If anything, I love that DePINs are growing. I'm quite optimistic that with a great deal of attention, we could see this turn into something that aids blockchains and its numerous applications scale effectively, pretty quickly at that.
In the coming months, I may have to start doing some digging on the specifics of each of these DePIN projects I see around.
Image source: ideogram.ai