Market map: DePIN: decentralized infrastructure for energy & sensing — the categories that will matter next

The Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN) sector crossed $35 billion in combined market capitalization in late 2025, representing a 280% increase from early 2024 levels. More significantly for sustainability practitioners, DePIN protocols now coordinate over 2.1 million physical devices globally—from wireless hotspots and environmental sensors to solar inverters and electric vehicle chargers. This represents a fundamental shift in how physical infrastructure for energy and sensing can be deployed, owned, and monetised at scale. The next 12-24 months will determine which categories capture lasting value and which prove to be tokenised speculation masquerading as innovation.

Why It Matters

The convergence of blockchain infrastructure and physical-world systems addresses a persistent market failure: the capital intensity and coordination complexity of deploying distributed infrastructure. Traditional approaches to energy sensing, IoT networks, and environmental monitoring require either massive upfront investment from centralised entities or fragmented, uncoordinated efforts that fail to achieve network effects.

DePIN changes this equation by tokenising participation incentives. According to Messari's 2025 State of DePIN report, the sector attracted $1.2 billion in venture funding during 2024-2025, with energy and environmental sensing applications representing 34% of deployed capital—up from 18% in 2023. The shift reflects growing recognition that climate infrastructure requires new coordination mechanisms.

The numbers tell a compelling story. Helium's IoT network grew from 350,000 to over 980,000 active hotspots between January 2024 and December 2025, making it the largest decentralised wireless network ever deployed. Energy Web's ecosystem now processes over 15 million renewable energy certificate (REC) transactions annually, representing 8% of the global voluntary carbon market's underlying verification layer. DIMO has connected over 175,000 vehicles, generating the largest open vehicle data set outside of major automakers.

For sustainability investors and practitioners, DePIN offers something genuinely novel: a mechanism to align individual economic incentives with collective infrastructure deployment for climate monitoring, grid optimisation, and environmental measurement. The question is no longer whether decentralised coordination can work for physical infrastructure—it demonstrably can. The question is which categories will deliver measurable sustainability outcomes versus which will remain financially interesting but environmentally marginal.

Key Concepts

DePIN Tokenomics

The foundational innovation of DePIN is using cryptographic tokens to incentivise physical infrastructure deployment and operation. Participants earn tokens for contributing hardware, bandwidth, data, or energy services. The token's value creates a self-reinforcing flywheel: as more participants join, network utility increases, driving token value, attracting more participants.

However, tokenomics design determines success or failure. First-generation DePIN projects often suffered from inflationary token emissions that outpaced demand growth, leading to price collapse and participant abandonment. Second-generation designs incorporate burn mechanisms, staking requirements, and utility-based demand sinks that create more sustainable economic models.

The critical metric is the ratio of token emissions to verifiable real-world value creation. Projects where this ratio exceeds 5:1 typically face structural challenges; those below 2:1 demonstrate sustainable unit economics.

Proof of Physical Work

Unlike purely digital blockchains where consensus involves computational work, DePIN networks must verify that physical actions occurred in the real world. Proof of Physical Work (PoPW) mechanisms combine cryptographic attestation with physical verification to confirm that a sensor took a measurement, a hotspot transmitted data, or a solar panel generated electricity.

The sophistication of PoPW directly correlates with network integrity. Basic implementations use GPS and timestamps, which are easily spoofed. Advanced implementations incorporate hardware-secured enclaves, multi-party verification, and physical challenge-response protocols. Energy Web's decentralised identifiers for energy assets, for example, link cryptographic proofs to metered production data verified by grid operators.

Decentralised Wireless and IoT

DePIN wireless networks deploy coverage through crowd-sourced hardware rather than traditional telecommunications infrastructure. This category includes LoRaWAN networks for IoT sensors (Helium), 5G small cells (Pollen Mobile), and WiFi sharing (Wayru). For sustainability applications, decentralised wireless enables sensor deployment in areas underserved by commercial networks—remote environmental monitoring, agricultural IoT, and distributed air quality measurement.

The economic advantage is substantial. Traditional IoT network deployment costs $15,000-50,000 per square kilometre for carrier-grade coverage. DePIN approaches achieve comparable coverage at $500-2,000 per square kilometre by distributing hardware costs across participants who benefit from token incentives.

Energy Tokenisation

Energy tokenisation converts kilowatt-hours, renewable energy certificates, and grid services into blockchain-based assets. This enables peer-to-peer energy trading, granular carbon accounting, and new financing mechanisms for distributed energy resources. Energy Web Foundation pioneered this approach, with over 50 utilities and corporations now using their technology stack.

Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) represent the most commercially mature application. By aggregating distributed batteries, solar installations, and flexible loads onto blockchain coordination layers, VPPs can participate in wholesale energy markets without centralised control. Sonnen's blockchain-enabled VPP in Germany coordinates over 30,000 residential batteries, delivering 200MW of grid services.

Sensor Networks for MRV

Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) for carbon markets and environmental compliance increasingly relies on IoT sensors generating continuous data streams. DePIN architectures address the trust problem in MRV by distributing data collection across independent operators and anchoring measurements to immutable blockchain records.

WeatherXM deploys community-owned weather stations that feed climate data to reinsurance models, agricultural planning, and carbon offset verification. Arkreen focuses specifically on renewable energy MRV, with solar monitoring devices across Southeast Asia generating verified production data for carbon credit issuance.

DePIN Performance Metrics by Category

Category	Active Devices (2025)	Annual Revenue	Token Value Stability	Sustainability Impact
Decentralised Wireless	>1.2 million	$85-120M	Medium (30-50% annual volatility)	Medium
Energy/Grid Services	>350,000	$45-75M	High (15-25% annual volatility)	High
Environmental Sensing	>125,000	$15-30M	Low (60-80% annual volatility)	High
Vehicle Data	>200,000	$20-40M	Medium (35-50% annual volatility)	Medium
Compute/Storage	>250,000	$150-200M	Medium (25-40% annual volatility)	Low

What's Working and What Isn't

What's Working

Helium's Migration and Network Expansion: After migrating to Solana in 2023, Helium's network stabilised significantly. The IoT network now processes over 2 billion data packets monthly, with enterprise customers including Lime, Victor Mousetrap, and Salesforce using the infrastructure for asset tracking and sensor connectivity. The mobile network (Helium Mobile) exceeded 500,000 subscribers by late 2025, demonstrating that DePIN can achieve consumer adoption at scale. The key success factor: focusing on genuine utility rather than speculation.

Energy Web's Enterprise Adoption: Energy Web Foundation's technology stack—including decentralised identifiers, worker nodes, and the Green Proofs verification system—now underlies renewable energy tracking for organisations including Shell, Volkswagen, and Acciona. The 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy matching system enables hourly verification that electricity consumption matches renewable generation. This granular matching, impossible with traditional annual REC accounting, enables genuine emissions reduction claims. Enterprise adoption provides stable demand independent of token speculation.

DIMO's Vehicle Data Marketplace: DIMO has created the largest open connected vehicle data set by incentivising car owners to share anonymised vehicle data. Insurance companies, urban planners, and EV charging networks purchase this data through token-denominated access. The sustainability application: DIMO data enables cities to optimise EV charging infrastructure deployment and verify electric miles travelled for carbon accounting. The model works because data buyers pay in tokens, creating genuine utility demand.

Arkreen's Renewable Energy MRV: Operating primarily in Southeast Asia, Arkreen deploys low-cost monitoring hardware on distributed solar installations. The devices verify production and feed data to carbon credit registries, enabling small-scale solar owners to monetise environmental attributes previously inaccessible due to verification costs. Over 50MW of distributed solar now generates verified data through the network, with carbon credit revenues flowing to device owners.

What Isn't Working

Token Volatility Undermining Participant Economics: Many DePIN participants—especially those deploying energy hardware with multi-year payback periods—face impossible financial planning when token values fluctuate 50-80% annually. A solar monitoring device promising $15/month in token rewards becomes economically irrational when token devaluation reduces actual returns to $3/month. Projects without mechanisms to stabilise participant returns face adverse selection: only speculators remain, undermining network utility.

Regulatory Uncertainty Chilling Investment: Energy markets face extensive regulation, and DePIN projects navigating utility laws, securities regulations, and grid interconnection requirements face significant compliance costs. In the UK, several energy-focused DePIN projects paused expansion pending clarity on whether tokens constituting energy revenue shares qualify as securities under FCA oversight. Similar uncertainty exists across EU jurisdictions regarding MiCA application to utility tokens.

Hardware Quality and Coordination Failures: Decentralised networks sacrifice quality control inherent in centralised deployments. Inconsistent hardware quality, poor installation practices, and inadequate maintenance plague several DePIN networks. Hivemapper's mapping network discovered that over 15% of dashcam contributors provided unusable data due to improper mounting or lens degradation. Environmental sensing networks face calibration drift that compromises data quality without centralised maintenance programmes.

Geographic Concentration: Despite decentralisation rhetoric, DePIN networks often concentrate in wealthy regions where participants can afford hardware investment. Helium's coverage density in San Francisco exceeds rural Mississippi by a factor of 200:1. This undermines the promise of extending infrastructure to underserved areas—the opposite outcome occurs without deliberate intervention.

Key Players

Established Leaders

Helium (Nova Labs) — The pioneer of decentralised wireless, operating both IoT and mobile networks on Solana. Market cap peaked at $4.5 billion; stabilised near $1.8 billion. Key differentiator: actual enterprise customers and carrier partnerships (T-Mobile MVNO).

Filecoin (Protocol Labs) — Decentralised storage network with over 25 exabytes of capacity. While primarily a storage protocol, increasingly relevant for climate data archiving and environmental dataset preservation. Long-term data persistence enables climate model training and historical analysis.

Energy Web Foundation — The enterprise backbone for energy sector DePIN applications. Not a token-speculative play but a utility-focused protocol with Shell, Acciona, and Vodafone as ecosystem participants. Their Green Proofs system is becoming the de facto standard for renewable energy verification.

Render Network — Decentralised GPU computing with sustainability applications in climate modelling and satellite imagery processing. Processes over 40 million rendering jobs monthly, with increasing allocation to scientific computing.

Emerging Startups

DIMO — Vehicle data network with 175,000+ connected vehicles. Raised $15 million Series A in 2024. Primary sustainability use case: EV adoption analytics and charging infrastructure optimisation.

Hivemapper — Decentralised mapping using dashcam-equipped vehicles. Over 180 million kilometres mapped. Sustainability application: monitoring infrastructure conditions, urban heat mapping, and traffic pattern analysis for emissions modelling.

Arkreen — Solar MRV focused on emerging markets. Raised $8 million seed funding. Enables carbon credit generation for small-scale distributed solar previously excluded from voluntary carbon markets.

WeatherXM — Community-owned weather station network providing ground-truth climate data. Over 6,000 stations deployed globally. Data feeds climate risk modelling, agricultural planning, and extreme weather prediction.

Glow — Solar farm financing through blockchain tokenisation, enabling fractional ownership of utility-scale installations. Launched in 2024 with $25 million in tokenised solar assets.

Key Investors & Funders

Multicoin Capital — Leading DePIN thesis investor; backed Helium, Render, and Hivemapper. Published influential "DePIN Sector Map" establishing category definitions.

a]6z crypto (Andreessen Horowitz) — Invested in Helium, FluxAI, and multiple energy-focused DePIN projects through their crypto fund.

Borderless Capital — Algorand ecosystem fund backing Arkreen and energy-focused DePIN applications.

Energy Web Ventures — Corporate venture arm deploying capital into enterprise energy DePIN applications.

European Innovation Council — EU funding mechanism supporting decentralised infrastructure research, including several MRV-focused projects.

Examples

1. Sonnen's Blockchain-Coordinated Virtual Power Plant (Germany): Sonnen, acquired by Shell in 2019, operates one of Europe's largest residential battery networks. Their blockchain coordination layer aggregates 30,000+ batteries representing 200MW of dispatchable capacity. The system provides frequency regulation services to the German grid operator, earning homeowners €150-300 annually while contributing to grid stability. The blockchain layer enables real-time coordination and transparent revenue distribution that would be computationally prohibitive through centralised systems. This demonstrates that DePIN architecture can enhance, rather than replace, existing energy infrastructure.

2. DIMO's EV Charging Infrastructure Optimisation (United States): Los Angeles County partnered with DIMO to analyse vehicle movement patterns and charging behaviour across 40,000 connected EVs. The data revealed that existing public charging infrastructure was misaligned with actual demand—stations in commercial districts sat idle while residential areas faced chronic shortages. Using DIMO data, the county redirected $12 million in charging infrastructure investment, projecting 35% higher utilisation and 8,000 additional tonnes of CO2 reduction annually through accelerated EV adoption.

3. Arkreen's Distributed Solar MRV in Vietnam: Traditional carbon credit verification costs $5,000-15,000 per project, making it uneconomical for small-scale solar installations. Arkreen's monitoring hardware costs $45 per installation and generates verified production data automatically. In Vietnam's Mekong Delta region, over 3,000 smallholder farmers now monetise solar production through carbon credits enabled by Arkreen verification—averaging $120 annually per household. The model demonstrates how DePIN can extend climate finance to previously excluded populations.

Action Checklist

• Evaluate tokenomics sustainability before investment—calculate the ratio of token emissions to verifiable real-world value creation and avoid projects exceeding 5:1
• Assess Proof of Physical Work mechanisms for spoofing resistance; prefer hardware-secured implementations over GPS-only verification
• Prioritise projects with enterprise customers or regulated entity partnerships that provide demand stability independent of token speculation
• Review regulatory exposure in target jurisdictions; energy-focused DePIN faces securities, utility, and grid interconnection compliance requirements
• Analyse geographic distribution to verify decentralisation claims; concentrated networks undermine both resilience and social impact narratives
• Evaluate hardware quality control mechanisms; networks without standardised equipment or maintenance protocols face data quality degradation
• Consider token volatility impact on participant economics; projects without stabilisation mechanisms face adverse selection toward speculators
• Track sustainability impact metrics (tonnes CO2, verified renewable MWh, sensor data quality) rather than solely financial returns

FAQ

Q: How do DePIN projects differ from traditional IoT or energy technology companies? A: The fundamental difference is coordination mechanism. Traditional companies deploy infrastructure through capital expenditure and retain ownership; DePIN projects incentivise distributed ownership through token rewards. This enables faster scaling at lower centralised capital requirements but introduces challenges in quality control, regulatory compliance, and economic stability. The token mechanism aligns participant incentives but also exposes networks to cryptocurrency market volatility.

Q: What regulatory frameworks apply to energy-focused DePIN in the UK and EU? A: Energy-focused DePIN faces three regulatory domains: securities regulation (whether tokens constitute investment contracts), energy market regulation (grid access, metering standards, utility licensing), and data protection (GDPR compliance for sensor data). The EU's MiCA regulation, fully effective in 2025, provides clearer token classification but explicitly excludes utility tokens with genuine consumption value—a category where many DePIN projects claim membership. The UK FCA has not issued specific DePIN guidance, creating uncertainty for projects operating in British markets.

Q: Can DePIN networks achieve sufficient scale to impact global sustainability outcomes? A: Current scale remains modest relative to global infrastructure—Helium's 1 million hotspots compare to 5 million traditional cellular towers, and energy DePIN networks represent less than 0.1% of global renewable capacity. However, growth trajectories are exponential rather than linear. More importantly, DePIN's value may lie in enabling previously impossible coordination—hourly renewable energy matching, micro-scale carbon credit generation, and distributed environmental sensing—rather than replacing centralised infrastructure at equivalent scale.

Q: How should investors evaluate DePIN token value versus underlying network utility? A: Sustainable DePIN valuation requires separating speculative premium from utility value. Calculate the network's annual revenue from actual users paying for services, then compare to token market capitalisation. Ratios exceeding 50:1 (market cap to revenue) suggest significant speculative premium. Additionally, examine token velocity—tokens held for utility tend to have lower velocity than those held for speculation. Networks where tokens primarily circulate between exchanges rather than between users and service providers are speculation-driven.

Q: What are the environmental costs of blockchain-based DePIN coordination? A: Modern DePIN networks predominantly use proof-of-stake blockchains (Solana, Polygon, Algorand) with minimal energy footprint—typically less than 0.001% of the energy value transacted. Helium's migration to Solana reduced network energy consumption by over 99% compared to its previous architecture. The relevant comparison is not blockchain energy use but whether DePIN coordination enables sustainability outcomes—renewable energy verification, emissions monitoring, grid optimisation—that outweigh infrastructure energy costs.

Sources

• Messari Research, "State of DePIN 2025," January 2025
• Helium Foundation, "Network Statistics Dashboard," accessed January 2026
• Energy Web Foundation, "2025 Annual Impact Report," December 2025
• McKinsey & Company, "Decentralised Infrastructure for Energy Transition," September 2025
• Multicoin Capital, "DePIN Sector Map and Investment Thesis," August 2024
• International Energy Agency, "Digitalisation and Decentralisation in Energy," November 2025
• DIMO Network, "Connected Vehicle Data Marketplace Report," Q3 2025
• European Commission, "Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation Implementation Guidance," June 2025