DePIN Climbs Out of Speculation: Revenues Rise Even as Tokens Plunge

A new analysis reframes decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) as moving from narrative-driven speculation toward observable commercial activity. The report documents measurable onchain receipts across bandwidth, compute, energy and sensing verticals and estimates the category has become a multibillion-dollar market with roughly $72 million in onchain revenue last year. A subset of projects now clear concrete revenue and fundraising thresholds—projects with ≥ $500k ARR and ≥ $30m raised—making them visible to institutional investors even as many legacy tokens trade far below prior peaks. The study also finds that much of the monetizable activity is shifting from base-layer fee pools to application and service layers where stablecoin rails, custody solutions and interfaces capture recurring flows tied to real customers. That redistribution concentrates competitive advantage in teams that control UX, custody and monetized service paths, and it makes composability and standards—service discovery and cross-agent protocols—material drivers of scale by enabling auditable machine‑to‑machine transactions. Emerging InfraFi primitives that route stable-value deposits into asset-backed yields are already being used to finance real capacity, but they also create concentrated counterparty and custody risk that could attract conservative capital only with stronger legal clarity. Regulatory and macro conditions remain critical: token classification, custody rules and liquidity cycles will shape institutional demand and the design choices founders make for tokenomics and governance. The report concludes that operational traction—repeatable receipts and standards-driven interoperability—gives DePIN projects a plausible path to durable infrastructure businesses, but scaling without recreating centralized chokepoints or tripping regulatory scrutiny will be the sector’s central test over the next 12–24 months.