Decentralized Physical Infrastructure, or DePIN, has the potential to reshape the dynamics of some of the world’s most important markets. Over the past decade, projects have tackled a broad range of industries: information storage, 5G and LoRaWAN, mapping and weather data, computing power, internet bandwidth, and many more. As a variety of DePIN projects have scaled over the years, they have taught us some valuable lessons regarding the unique dynamics of scaling both supply and demand.
Historically, supply has been the easiest component to build. Many projects have proven that tokenomics can drive early adoption within web3 communities. Ecosystem participants love to spread the gospel of certain projects, especially when referral incentives are baked in. A nice feature of web3 communities is that people are excited to try new things. Sometimes, that’s because of a deep belief in the promise of crypto and user-owned networks; sometimes, it’s because it’s fun and the memes are good; sometimes, it’s because of a belief in the potential economic upside of early participation.
An emerging dynamic in DePIN projects is that they are much easier to scale when users do not have to purchase new hardware to participate and can lend something from existing machinery, be it compute, storage, or bandwidth, to get up and running. Filecoin, Arweave, Render, and Grass all benefit from this dynamic - it’s a low-cost endeavor and onboarding experience for a user to join the network, contribute to supply-side growth, and benefit from the upside.
While many projects have solved supply-side growth, it has proven more challenging to crack the code on scaling demand and building a big business. One hypothesis is that DePIN is best suited to thrive in categories where an emergent secular trend is expanding and creating new types of demand for a product offering. It is not about replacing existing infrastructure to meet existing demand; it is about reshaping it to meet the needs of an entirely new category.
Competing with incumbents with a stronghold on physical infrastructure is very difficult, especially when market conditions are relatively stagnant. These companies have long-term contracts with customers, decades of experience, and sometimes some form of regulatory capture. Usually, there’s no forcing function for a customer to switch providers.
To win a market with DePIN it must be in the process of being reshaped, and the project must be structurally suited to take advantage of that change. A good way of thinking about this is asking, “What new secular trends, markets, and pockets of demand are emerging because something is different in the world?” There’s a chance that a DePIN project may be best suited to capture that market. I like this approach because it’s a problem with market tailwinds in search of a solution instead of vice versa.
Grass, a residential proxy network enabling individuals to contribute unused bandwidth to provide data to train open-source AI models, is doing this. In the past, this market has been focused on scraping web data for marketers to track competitors' pricing and advertising trends, but today there is insatiable demand for all types of web data to train emerging AI models. Grass is structurally advantaged to service this emergent demand while existing residential proxy networks do not have the right type of supply or business model to compete. Render has a similar dynamic by providing compute for model training instead of data. AI is creating an infinite need for both data and compute, and Grass and Render are building decentralized networks to become highly aligned people-powered providers to this market.
In these examples, some new technological pressure is emerging that is beginning to change the shape of a market. And in these instances DePIN may be a meaningfully better solution than a centralized player. These projects can strategically sit adjacent to incumbents while providing a similar service to a different customer set in a way that is technologically and economically challenging to compete with.
As ideal as it is to think about how DePIN can scale the supply of critical infrastructure in novel ways, at the end of the day, a revenue-generating business must be built, and we must think about the evolving dynamics of the end market: what are the critical thresholds of supply that are required to meet new types of demand? What are the scale requirements across geographies for the service to be valuable? What are the barriers to building a viable business and what’s required for the project to tackle these challenges? Where is the structural competitive advantage relative to existing incumbents?
As more entrepreneurs seek to reshape large and important markets with DePIN, they must be thoughtful upfront about what the underlying business will look like. It’s much easier to ride the tailwinds of an emerging or evolving market than to battle against incumbents in a zero-sum game. We now definitively know that it is feasible to build decentralized infrastructure across the globe - now, we need to build the next generation of important businesses on top of them.
I'm a chess player and one of the things I still enjoy about twitter is stumbling on diagrams of chess tactics and trying to solve them. A couple weeks ago I thought I had the answer to a tactic so I started to scroll through the responses to see if it was right. That's when I saw someone respond by tagging @ChessvisionAI and I discovered an awesome product.
ChessvisionAI is a twitter bot. Someone responds to a tweet with a chess diagram in it by tagging the bot and then Chessvision.ai analyzes the position and responds with links to both chess.com and lichess.org with an analysis of the next best move. Here's an example of it in action.
I really like that ChessvisionAI responds with options to analyze positions in both chess.com and lichess.org and gives the user a choice as to which service they want to use (preferences can be pretty polarizing in the chess world). The experience is smooth and fast, and I now see ChessvisionAI popping up in the responses to virtually every chess tactic diagram. It's taken ahold of the chess world.
I find the idea behind this bot to be very powerful. It's a headless application, summoned in certain contexts and responds within the UI of that context. There's no home or central application for ChessvisionAI. It can live across Twitter, Discord, Reddit, etc. It's fluid and interoperable.
ChessvisionAI was created and is managed by one person, Pawel Kacprzak. He wrote a great post explaining the initial inspiration behind the idea and how he built it which went viral on Hacker News years ago. It's cool to see one individual have such an impact on the way we interact with chess diagrams and how their flexible approach meets users wherever they are.
Earlier this week, I hopped in an Uber with my family to get to our Lisbon apartment rental, and I felt a profound appreciation for the company. We were in a foreign country, and with the tap of a button, I could summon a car to safely get us home. It was reliable and worked the exact same way it does when I’m home in NYC or traveling anywhere else for that matter.
What Uber has accomplished over the past 15 years is nothing short of miraculous. I remember sitting outside TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco in 2010 when Travis pulled out his phone and showed Steve and me (and anyone else in a 2-mile radius who would pay attention) how he was calling a black car to pick him up. The app was clunky and the wait time was something like 20 minutes for a ride. Today I wait less than five minutes for a ride that is cheaper and safer than a taxi and available to me through the same app in virtually every city in the world. I don't think I've witnessed another company do anything like that in my career.
Jared Hecht on Warpcast
there is something magical about summoning an Uber in a foreign country and how it is always reliably there for you. it’s one of the greatest feats of startup building I’ve witnessed, a miraculously executed global-scale combination of software and physical infrastructure.
The media did an exceptional job vilifying Uber during its rise, and as a result, its history is often associated with scandal. That’s a shame because there are many important and positive things to learn from the company. Three of them are presently top of mind as I reflect on it:
Super outcomes require superhuman effort. Emil Michael, Uber’s chief business officer, has been a long-time friend of mine and was an advisor to both my companies. I watched him as he helped to build Uber from a company that had recently achieved product-market fit to a global behemoth. I’ve founded two companies and I’ve never worked as hard as he did when he built Uber. Absolute commitment to winning was part of the culture of the company. As my family was safely being transported around a foreign city earlier this week, all I could think was that wouldn’t have been possible were it not for the Uber teams’ maniacal work ethic. I remember it being commonplace to vilify the company and its leadership for its intense work culture. It would have never worked without it.
Another underappreciated aspect of Uber was its bold and innovative “capital as a moat” strategy, rapidly raising billions of dollars round after round. They were criticized for their lack of profitability and for using equity capital to block their competitors from markets and investor pools. They were deemed a capital-inefficient business that was never going to work. But they took that capital and built out physical infrastructure across the world in one decade in a way that had never been done before and at a speed that, in retrospect, seems unfathomable. Now it’s a $150B market cap and cash flow positive company that pioneered a bold and counterintuitive capital raising model currently employed by everyone involved in another transformative category, the LLM wars.
Think for yourself, and don't get swooped up by media narratives. Uber caught an infinite amount of flack as it was coming up. It was as if the world, particularly the media, was rooting for its downfall. During the moment, its hard-charging culture and agglomerate-all-the-cash strategy seemed like a recipe for disaster. At least that’s what the public narrative portrayed. But look at it now. It is almost certain that the global infrastructure Uber has built over the past 15 years would not exist were it not for the things that most people once lambasted about the company. Yes, absolutely Dara has done an exceptional job as CEO, shepherding the company as a public institution. But you don’t get to a place where you can hire a CEO like Dara without breaking some eggs along the way.
It took an Uber ride in a foreign country to appreciate these things fully. It’s easy to sour on companies as they are growing for doing things differently and for making mistakes publicly. But you don’t go from nothing to iconic without trekking through many gray areas. It’s important not to rush to judgment when the narrative and public sentiment turn. We see this every day in national politics, and we also see it when startups and new technologies make their way into the zeitgeist. Sometimes, things that are different that ruffle our feathers end up being true superpowers. I'm trying to be more conscious of that.
