According to Brian Trunzo, Global Head of Business Development at Polygon Labs, DePINs offer a chance to create innovative, helpful services while giving end users more power and value.
A few tech behemoths have gotten an unsettling amount of power over the internet in recent years, endangering our digital security and privacy. The recent CrowdStrike event serves as more than just a wake-up call; it’s a clear indicator that we’re dealing with a far larger issue. One failure caused widespread damage. Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) offer an alternative. DePIN totally circumvents the primary shortcomings of our existing centralized systems and provides a revolutionary method of tying the physical world to the blockchain itself.
DePIN networks are a brilliant way to connect decentralized blockchain networks to physical devices such as sensors, laptops, cellphones, and IoT (Internet of Things) gadgets. Users receive genuine benefits in digital assets for sharing data, providing resources, or maintaining operations. This is a fair bargain that has long been lacking in the digital world. This configuration releases users from the clutches of centralized intermediaries who have been abusing the system for far too long by making money off of user data, in addition to enabling users to gain from their participation. These middlemen make enormous profits while providing little value to users by using this data for analytics, marketing, and targeted advertising.
The concept is straightforward: disperse physical infrastructure and provide incentives to users who enhance the network. These contributions might take many different forms, such as renting out extra hard drive space, donating your internet bandwidth, or connecting weather sensors for real-time environmental data. They can also include sharing data about your driving habits or car performance. DePIN allows you to share your data and get rewarded, as opposed to simply giving it to large tech corporations so they can monetize it. Ensuring that every user becomes an active participant in the infrastructure they depend on is more important than merely getting involved.
Real World Applications:
Numerous facets of our daily lives are already being reimagined by DePIN-based projects today. Consider geolocation as an example. Thanks to blockchain networks such as GEODNET, position accuracy is being pushed to centimetre-level precision, opening up enormous opportunities in industries such as construction, agriculture, and drone operations. Thanks to a network powered by people who both contribute to and benefit from it, such solutions enable farmers to fine-tune crop management like never before, while building projects could reach new heights of precision and autonomous drones could navigate with pinpoint accuracy.
What is holding us back:
Although the cost-effectiveness of centralised alternatives may not yet be matched by current decentralised storage options, this is only a temporary obstacle. But this is a problem that can be solved. There will come a “sweet spot” where decentralised cloud storage becomes as efficient as centralised alternatives due to improvements in data compression and consumer-grade hardware.
The goal of technology is to prevent fragility. It’s not merely annoying or unacceptable that we will have significant disruptions as a result of single points of failure; rather, it is a scathing critique of our current system. However, this issue is also addressable; to do so, we must fully decentralise every component of our digital infrastructure, including components that are sometimes disregarded like provers in blockchain systems.
This transition will be powered by open-source tools. Provers and other essential infrastructure are already being built using ZK tools like Plonky3, which are being used by projects like Fleek to power extremely effective decentralised provers.
It has been long overdue for DePIN to be implemented. Not only does it have the ability to completely transform our digital environment, but it is also vital to the survival of an open and free internet in the future.
