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The truth: I only signed up to DePIN Day because I remembered it was something that u/LogrisTheBard was excited about. I had no idea what it actually was. Logris said that we should all look into DePIN, we would not regret it. I tried. I regretted it. Two weeks later, the "please join us for DePIN Day" email arrived in my inbox. "Fine," I thought, "I'll show him," and began a panicked crash-course in whatever it was I'd apparently agreed to attend.) DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network) is indeed a hot topic because it offers tangible innovation: building physical infrastructure using blockchain technology with tokens that have actual, practical use. DePIN offers the chance to shift ownership of physical infrastructure from centralized players to community driven networks. Now the hunt is on for real-world problems that DePIN can solve. Early that morning, a small bug triggered by a change in data permissions crashed the Cloudflare routing machines. Half the online world seemed to disappear. People stared at their phones as they arrived at the venue. DePIN Day Buenos Aires was hosted at Artlab by Fluence, a decentralized serverless computing platform, and Filecoin, a decentralized storage network built on blockchain technology. The venue calls itself a creative laboratory and cultural center which translates to a dark room with blue LEDs crisscrossing the ceiling and techno thumping in the background. The vibe is nightclub rave meets airport lounge. I stumble in from the blinding sunshine to find half a dozen black tables scattered across the floor, each one covered in plushies and stickers with catchy slogans like 'Take back the FOCing cloud.' It's no secret that Filecoin are going to announce their cloud service today. An open bar offers coffee, water, and a variety of juices for those of us foolish enough to arrive on time, which by Buenos Aires standards means we are criminally early. Tom Trowbridge, co-founder of Fluence and our MC of the day, sits across from me, frantically finishing up his slides. Outside, Cloudflare is just as frantically trying to revive a collapsing internet after an outage of over five hours. Me, I'm just trying to work out what I signed up for. https://preview.redd.it/615ln7t95eag1.jpg?width=3095&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8c4d5f9229ad9a265f55bb1bcd8637d99e727f28 At home, I have an ADSB receiver set up, tracking the aircraft that fly overhead. My data feeds into various aviation sites that rely on this volunteer network to display real-time air traffic worldwide. So it's immediately clear to me how DePIN works because at its heart, it's exactly this, except that instead of just tracking out of love and feeding my data to the people who make the money, there are incentives for contributors like me. Instead of the centralized sites gaining all the benefit, we all share in the results that we are helping to create. I am accidentally the perfect audience for this technology. Trowbridge opens up the event with his trademark energy and humor, introducing the first speaker of the day: Danny O'Brien of the Filecoin Foundation. [Video] O'Brien's take is that DePIN is "what the Web was meant to be". He reminds us that right now half the Web is currently inaccessible as a result of a centralized outage, as if we could possibly forget. Then he says, “I, like everyone else, am sitting there with five to ten AI agents on my screen”. Five to ten agents? I don't even have five to ten tabs open. Does everyone else have a robot army? What do they do? I start counting on my fingers. I could have an agent to scroll Twitter for me. One to remind me where I'm supposed to be next. Maybe one to message my mother once a day confirming that I am eating well but not too well and of course I wish she were here with me. I'm out of ideas. I tune back in to hear him saying that we have to dismantle the idea that as content providers, we have to take on the burden of distribution. Now this is something I can get behind. I love writing. I hate distribution: trying to get the world to actually notice that I've written something. The whole point, he tells us, is that the internet is the distribution of knowledge. We can steer the AI agents to an ecosystem that is built for them. I consider this for a moment and then decide: Yes. Yes, I'm happy to give this article to my robot army. ChatGPT is usually more appreciative of my writing than Reddit anyway. https://preview.redd.it/sqrixx6d5eag1.jpg?width=2121&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ac66594558ae60a7f9fc464a48ebf2af3b51b142 The first panel of the day is DePIN as the Physical Layer of the AI Infrastructure with Juliana Mei (NodeOps), Stefaan Vervaet (@akave), Tom David (iExec) and Matej Janez (Oasis Protocol). [Video] Vervaet gives a fantastic explanation of why decentralized storage matters: geopolitical compliance. There's a whole conflict, he explains, between the US's Patriot Act vs Europe's GDPR. If the entity is in the US but datacenter is in Europe, can the US insist on access? As a reaction, many companies are looking for "sovereign cloud" options to derisk their situations. Matej doubles down on the trust issue. The centralized entities aren't supposed to access our data, but we know that they can. We need to feel confident that our encryption is secure and our private files are protected from <em>everyone</em>, that no one has access but us. They discuss direct sales of data, AI agents who can make micropayments, private payments for data without having to aggregate providers and direct payments on social media. AI agents will be the consumers of digital data. More than that, DePIN plus AI could become a type of distributed intelligence: A living creature. They agree that this is the best potential for AGI. They seem to think this is a good thing. What all of them seem to assume is that AI agents are going to become the primary customers of infrastructure, not humans. I make a quick note to write more nice things about AI agents before they take over the world. I promise not to make mine read Twitter. I know what happened to Tay.ai. Doug Petkanics of Livepeer is up next with a decade of DePIN innovation. He explains that originally, DePIN got lumped in with DeFi, even though these networks should be measured by who actually uses them, not by financial transactions. The operators aren't degen yield chasers. Reframing DePIN allowed the industry to focus on its real challenges, like how to govern public goods sustainably. https://preview.redd.it/lhrn2xvf5eag1.jpg?width=3205&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bead6f4b5c8de60f3959b7b6c17c43375a799e06 Crypto, he said, gives the supply side superpowers with incentives, smart contracts, global coordination and digital payments. The open marketplace allows for real competition and real price discovery. There are no shortcuts here: DePIN networks have to deliver real value outside of Web3. Fees are tied to actual usage, not speculation. Maximiliano Ejberowicz from Silencio takes to the stage to tell us about an unexpected market opportunity. Initially, they were focused on noise pollution, the largest environmental danger after air pollution. They gamified a user-friendly mobile app: measure noise and get rewarded. The result was a global noise map, which meant you could quickly look up an address, for example if you were buying a home or looking for a quiet hotel room, and get the noise levels on the place and the surroundings. They ended up with 1.4 million users and 13 million hours of noise level data: the largest noise level collection in the world. https://preview.redd.it/f0pddimi5eag1.jpg?width=2928&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=29bbb425c005cda5b177f4aa28a8031d49fd737d That's where the market opportunity appears. Modern AI is starving for fuel and internet data is already scraped clean. If AI is ever going to "hear" the world, it needs messy, real sound. Silencio already has it. And they have the infrastructure to get more. There are 7,000 languages and 40,000 dialects, he tells us, but only 1.4% are represented in current datasets. This is not a dataset problem that a single company can solve by hiring more people. AI hears only a fraction of the world. Silencio has started incentivising users to record their voices and get rewarded in order to unlock the rest. His point: The solution can only exist if millions of people are willing to contribute data because they’re compensated directly and transparently. Next, Evgeny Ponomarev of Fluence comes onstage to show us a demo. He explains that Fluence added GPUs to their decentralized cloud offering a month ago. I pause, my pen in the air. I thought Fluence were offering services for cloud providers, not a cloud provider themselves. He tries to show the demo. The demo refuses. He tells us that Fluence is a decentralized compute platform with locations in Europe, the US, Asia, and India. Compared to AWS and Hetzner, we're cheaper, he says, staring into the spotlight uncomfortably as he waits for a technical solution. The demo still doesn't work. He takes the chance to explain their aggregated DePIN offerings for GPUs. GPU supply is fragmented across different providers, regions and hardware types, so Fluence aggregates all those options the same way that flight comparison sites aggregate airlines and routes. The metaphor is excellent. The demo declines to choose this moment to shine. He is coming to accept that the demo will never work. He turns his laptop around and shows the screen to the audience. "It works here," he says, in case we think he brought a broken demo with him. It does work on his tiny laptop screen. It does not work on the screen behind him. He pastes on a happy face and tells us to go to the website, try it ourselves, pay in stablecoins, request GPU access (but not CPU yet, for reasons). Check out the console, he says. It's all there. We applaud his brave face and move on as quickly as possible. It's time for the big Filecoin announcement. Filecoin is building a decentralized, verifiable, Onchain Cloud. The stage becomes a blur of speakers and slides, each one highlighting a different angle. Filecoin's goal: to become the foundational data layer for AI agents and DePIN applications. https://preview.redd.it/hzlchhsl5eag1.jpg?width=2676&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fb396813ff221c4cc94cc5febb10997d485b73f5 My rapid-fire bullet points from the firehose of information:
And then Marta Belcher of the Filecoin Foundation wrapped it all up by reminding everyone (again) that Filecoin is the world's largest decentralized onchain network… and this is just the beginning. My take-away was that this wasn’t a launch so much as a claim: a declaration that storage, compute, and naming should exist independently of whoever happens to be running the cloud this decade. Whether anyone actually wants that yet was left unresolved. It's lunch time. I get a small bowl of rice with a hunk of meat. A Colombian woman tells me how much she loves California and that the rest of the world is going to hell. I'm not sure I'm capable of taking in any new information. The next talk pulls me back in, with a completely charming success story. Stefaan Vervaet comes back on stage to show us Skymapper, a global network of telescopes. [Video] https://preview.redd.it/h2o5t1qn5eag1.jpg?width=3324&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=23bcc72545194c6fcf6cbcfdb29e61268a65cc72 Skymapper stores its data on the Akave Cloud, which is built on the Avalanche L1 blockchain. The immutability is key here because it provides proof that the data hasn't been tampered with. There are even checks to ensure that a given telescope legitimate by confirming constellations it should be able to see ("show us Mars in the next five minutes"). The sister app Skyviewer offers live-stream video from individual telescopes. Stefaan walks us through the interface: the system connects, auto-aligns, you pick an object in the database and the telescope obediently swivels to it and then zooms in. The woman in front of me tries to load the app on her phone but quits when it asks her to buy a telescope. Manolis Nikiforakis follows with WeatherXM, a decentralized network of small, modular weather stations as low as $320, whose owners earn money from the data. [Video] WeatherXM currently has the data from over 9000 weather stations, many in what were previously weather-station blackspots. They sell the analytics to enterprises while sharing profits with the station owners. With an initial investment of thirteen million US dollars, they now have 9.5k users, making for an average cost of $1.3k per deployed station. For comparison, NOAA spends around $120,000 to deploy a new weather station. Taken together, Skymapper and WeatherXM stood out because nothing needed defending: simple hardware, obvious data value, and a reward structure that didn’t require a whitepaper to explain. At that point, my notes say something about beaver art, which I can only assume means I was dangerously close to losing my mind. The next panel pushed me to pay attention. 'How VCs See the Future of DePIN' with Tom Trowbridge, Regan Bozman of Lattice, Vinayak Kurup of Escape Velocity and Chad Fowler of Blue Yard Capital was a fun and friendly discussion of how they look for successful investments. [Video] https://preview.redd.it/dg2kq31v5eag1.jpg?width=3324&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3220a373ae4dccc5ef8966c57f9508b67b7aa609 I've never heard of any of them, but then no one has ever considered investing in me. They talk about DePIN companies needing to have actual utility. Only in this industry would that need stating so directly. They love projects that have identified a gap in the market and people who are actually wanting the service provided. "I have to separate my nerd brain from my investor brain," says Fowler, on the subject of very cool but not necessarily lucrative ideas. They talk about active vs passive dePIN, data automatically collected (like the weather stations) as opposed to data that needs to be submitted (recordings for Silencio) and liquid tokens ("we can invest by buying and holding" says one. "we don't do that" says another.) They all agree that the tokenomics are important. One refers to the Cloudflare outage so I get another drink. Proof of stake networks are technically DePIN, says another, and I think my brain just broke. Next on the stage is David Vorick of Glow. [Video] Glow is a DePIN project aimed at building new solar farms by giving people incentives to fund renewable energy directly. The VCs had already spoken glowingly (haha) about Glow so I know this is one of the projects everyone is quietly rooting for. And it's true, Vorick's story of how they started thinking about the problem is truly inspirational. Bitcoin uses more energy than the entire country of Argentina. Fundamentally, an anonymous guy wrote some code and sixteen years later, it's using an entire country of electricity. Can we build something that big? The answer turned out to be yes. Instead of relying on governments or giant utilities, Glow uses a blockchain model to reward the creation of clean energy as physical infrastructure. They are already successful in India and are ready to expand further. The pitch is simple enough that even my conference-addled brain can hang onto it: build solar, earn rewards, help push the world a little closer to running on clean energy. Sadly, at this point in the late afternoon, my notes collapse entirely into a single line that just says William Kempster ar.io. There is nothing else. The video evidence is that Kempster spoke and my brain simply checked out. I apparently did not regain consciousness for the panel on 'The New Compute Stack: Decentralized, Verifiable and Scalable,' featuring speakers from Fluence, Akash Network, Consensys and Zeeve. My notes for this panel are, once again, non-existent. I'm pretty sure the panel happened. I was definitely in the room. Apparently I was no longer capable of retaining information. I share this in the interest of journalistic integrity. Thankfully, there is a video of the panel if you want to see what I missed. The final talk of the day was a fireside chat between Tom Trowbridge of Fluence and Juan Benet of Filecoin. [Video] Everyone seemed to breathe a happy sigh of relief, including the speakers. They were relaxed, almost suspiciously calm for two men who had just pulled off an all-day launch that had exhausted even the hoodied young men hovering by the sad remains of the snack table. According to my half-legible hieroglyphs written by a woman holding on by a thread, they never once mentioned the Cloudflare outage. Which meant I had officially run out of excuses to keep taking shots every time someone invoked the day’s outage. The sun was going down. My notes were a crime scene. I staggered out into the fading Buenos Aires evening with the quiet serenity of someone who had survived DePIN Day through sheer spite and caffeine. https://preview.redd.it/e7m4bmuy5eag1.jpg?width=2910&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=df5255aa252dd3f2d641721ae5d625e7239f0e19 Until the next morning. It seemed to me that a decentralized on-chain cloud was genuinely exciting. So why was no one talking about it on stage at Devconnect? I got part of the answer from u/Hanniabu. I had told him that I was sitting in the yellow pavilion. He replied with a series of increasingly pointed questions, none of which I could answer, because I genuinely thought I was in the yellow pavilion. I sent him a photo of my view. He used it to determine that I was not, in fact, anywhere near the yellow pavilion. A few minutes later, he appeared in person, having reverse-engineered my location from the photograph alone. “Aren’t Filecoin their own chain?” he asked. Correct! But somehow this was never mentioned during the event. Filecoin is a purpose-built standalone L1 chain. They are EVM-compatible, in that they introduced the Filecoin Ethereum Virtual Machine (FEVM) as a runtime environment on top of the Filecoin Virtual Machine. However, they are not an Ethereum chain, by design. Not an ERC-20. Not really Ethereum-conference-compatible. But then at the Ethereum Privacy Stack, I saw a few mentions of Filecoin, a lot of mentions of Protocol Labs. And still not a single reference to the decentralized cloud aiming to take on AWS headfirst. I went to Mykola Siusko to ask about this. "Do we not like them?" I asked. "Sure we do!" There were lots of things to like. Protocol Labs are committed to privacy and were an event sponsor. But, he said with a world-weary shrug, not everyone could get a moment on the stage. They had only seven hours. He hadn't been following their news, he admitted. "We like them," he told me, "but that doesn't mean we have to sleep with them." Then he pointed. "Kurt Opsahl is right there. Talk to him. He's a good guy." Now on the spot, I duly hovered next to Kurt Opsahl while someone told him his entire life story. Opsahl had given a fantastic talk at the cypherpunk day, declaring that code is protected by freedom of expression just as a book might. When the person talking to him took a deep breath, I introduced myself and asked about Filecoin's commitment to privacy as a part of the cloud services. Was it baked in? Opsahl was happy to talk to me but noticeably indirect. We have providers, he told me. We want people to create encrypted storage. We want to give people choices. His colleague, Clara, jumped in to say she'd been asked exactly this earlier and had come up with an analogy. Think of a house full of robots doing all the cleaning, she told us. I thought about my robo-cleaner named Heinz, short for Heinzelmännchen. Heinz was probably quietly pining away in the dust waiting for my return. Right now, Clara said, if you want to upload their data, you'd have to upload it to big tech and no one wants all of their house videos there. I flinched at the thought of uploading vacuuming videos. I think my apartment would be a lot cleaner if I had an army of robots who looked after me. They probably wouldn't care for me the way that Heinz did. But more importantly, I couldn't think of a reason why I would want him to upload his videos to the Internet. "The point is," she said, and it was a good point, despite my distracted state, "that we want people to have a choice." Not just 'big tech' vs 'filecoin'. Because their service is modular, she explained, I have every opportunity to work out exactly what combination is important to me. But I was still stuck on the idea of Heinz sharing videos of the dust under my coffee table. Of my bra, twisted, draped over the back of the sofa. I wondered if, in the future, there would be livestreams of people's homes being cleaned. Apartments, terraced housing, cottages, penthouses, everywhere from Mumbai to Paris to Buenos Aires, robots videoing the rooms as they clean them. My eyes widened. I would totally watch that, I thought. And it would make a perfect DePIN project. Every robo-cleaner uploads their stream and we all get a share of the profits. Huge once Netflix buys in. Clara smiled at my interest. "You can make your own decisions about privacy, convenience, and other aspects," she said. I thanked them both for their time and escaped before my treacherous brain could ask them if I could monetize my cleaning videos on their platform. I think it is safe to say that DePIN day has changed my entire outlook on life, and possibly my income stream. I'll talk to Heinz about it. (This is an EVMavericks production.) submitted by /u/Twelvemeatballs |
