DePINs fall into two categories: PRN (physical resource network) and DRN (digital resource network):

• PRNs incentivize users to employ equipment to provide goods and services in the real world, such as 5G, VPN, and others.

• DRNs encourage those who use equipment to create real physical infrastructure networks for digital resources.

Major crypto funds like Coinbase Ventures, Pantera Capital, and Spartan Group are making a big bet on this narrative in their forecasts for 2024. This view is also held by one of the world’s biggest funds, VanEck.

The market is already packed with projects that are traded on exchanges or those getting ready to issue tokens.

Trading Tokens

There are several dozen tokens of DePIN projects available in the market. We’ve analyzed the most interesting ones.

Filecoin

Filecoin (FIL) is a direct competitor to giants like AWS, Google Cloud Services, and Microsoft Azure. It’s a decentralized data storage network.

TVL: the figure tripled over the last few months to $2.51M, nearing new all-time highs.

Market Cap: $5.46B.

FDV: $20.42B.

Circulating Supply: 26.7%.

Token Price: $10.41, down by 95% from its highs and only by 3x from its lows.

Filecoin is likely the safest bet on the DePIN narrative, though its not-so-good tokenomics, with early users receiving large rewards, might serve as a bearish factor.

Render Network

Render Network (RNDR) is a leading provider of decentralized rendering solutions based on GPUs.

Market Cap: $4.3B.

FDV: $6B.

Circulating Supply: 71.7%.

Token Price: $11.28, the token is already trading close to its all-time highs.

Render Network could play out well not only on the DePIN narrative but also on the AI one, since it also utilizes graphics processors. Plus, RNDR is partnering with Apple. It’ll be presenting at the upcoming NVIDIA conference, which could serve as another price catalyst.

Helium

Helium (HNT) is a truly decentralized blockchain network that connects IoT devices. It relies on the community and their nodes. By deploying hotspots and managing the nodes, users receive token rewards for participating in the network’s operations.

Market Cap: $1.35B.

FDV: $1.85B.

Circulating Supply: 72.8%.

Token Price: $8.28, down by 84% from its highs and up by 7.874% from its lows.

Arweave

Arweave (AR) is a data storage platform based on the Proof-of-Access protocol that creates persistent and scalable storage. It offers low-cost data storage, high throughput, and censorship resistance.

Market Cap: $2.4B.

FDV: $2.42B.

Circulating Supply: 99.2%.

Token Price: $36.7, down by 60% from its highs, and up by 12.153% from its lows.

Arweave is used by many projects, including Lens. Moreover, it recently launched the Arweave AO testnet, with the AO Hyper Parallel Computer playing a key role. It aims at scaling the blockchain for social networks and AI apps. Participation in the testnet is possible. A good factor is that almost all tokens are already in circulation.

More interesting trading DePIN tokens are available on CryptoRank.

Potential Airdrops

Given that the narrative is still only in its infancy, there are lots of new projects without tokens yet.

io.net

io.net is a decentralized computing network that enables developing machine learning apps on the Solana blockchain.

Investments: $30M from Hack VC, Multicoin Capital, Delphi Digital, Animoca Brands, and others.

What to do: participate in the Galxe campaign and be active on Discord.

Privasea

Privasea is a decentralized AI network that uses Fully Homomorphic Encryption Machine Learning (FHEML).

Investments: $5M from Binance Labs, MH Ventures, and others.

What to do: participate in the testnet.

Gensyn

Gensyn is a marketplace that allows small data centers and individual devices to provide computing power for machine learning.

Investments: $43M from a16z, CoinFund, and Maven 11 Capital.

What to do: provide or receive computing power at the early stage of the project by filling out a form on the website.

Fleek

Fleek is a platform that builds websites and applications on IPFS. Fleek strives to create an interface and protocol layer to make the basic level of Web3 services available to users.

Investments: $25M from Polychain Capital, Coinbase Ventures, DCG, and others.

What to do: participate in the testnet.

More interesting trading DePIN tokens are available on CryptoRank.

Conclusion

The DePIN narrative is at the intersection of blockchain and the real world, and leading financial funds believe in its success. Besides, many projects interact with AI, a pivotal technology of recent years. It’ll undoubtedly play a very important role in blockchain development, so it’s worth exploring more about the projects of this narrative.

What is Dencun Upgrade?

Dencun (EIP-4844) is a long-awaited update to Ethereum that introduces proto-danksharding, significantly reducing gas fees on Layer 2 blockchains.

How much will the gas change? About 10-50 times, depending on the type of transaction. You can compare commissions before and after EIP-4844 here. This update is especially relevant amid the surging gas, when fees on major L2s could surpass $2 per transaction.

How is the reduction in gas fees achieved and why does it not affect the Ethereum network itself? It's all about the amount of information stored by L2 blockchains on Ethereum. Proto-dunksharing reveals a new approach to data compression using binary large objects (blob) that will not be stored forever on Ethereum. 

Storing them for a short period of time (up to several months) saves a large amount of memory, thus reducing the load on the network and, consequently, the amount of commissions. Rollups take a couple of weeks at most to verify this data, and then it can be deleted.

Why Is Dencun Important For Airdrop Hunters?

So far, several major Layer 2 blockchains haven't announced the launch of their coins. On the horizon we have zkSync, Scroll, Linea, Zora, and many more airdrops, not to mention the fact that new L2s launching almost every week. 

In addition, we should not forget about LayerZero, the main link between EVM blockchains, and many new projects building on Layer 2 blockchains: DeFi, GameFi, and many more...

On-chain transactions, boosting volumes, and interacting with different smart contracts will now become significantly cheaper, and thus increase the efficiency of farming airdrops. Dencun will also decrease the entry threshold for new users. Now it looks like Layer 2 blockchains will be able to compete with Solana in terms of gas fees!