Some DePIN Networks Are Getting Real Customers. Most Are Not.

A restaurant borrows a Helium radio for phone data. A studio rents a spare GPU. A lot of other projects only pay themselves in tokens.

DePIN is a simple idea that got a loud name. People put machines on a network, a radio on a roof, a hard drive in a closet, a GPU in a garage, a camera on a dashboard and they get paid when those machines do work. For a while the whole category was sold as the next everything. Then the tokens broke.

Messari’s last full look at the sector put circulating DePIN around $10 billion, with about $72 million in on-chain revenue across 2025. The multiples came down from the last-cycle fantasy to something closer to ten or twenty-five times revenue. Startups still raised money in private rounds, roughly a billion dollars.

Public tokens did not get that kindness. Render, Filecoin, Helium, and Akash all sat far under old highs while scheduled unlocks kept landing on the market.

Price is a bad way to read this group. Usage is better, and even usage is uneven.

Helium is the cleanest story because the traffic can be counted. After the network moved onto Solana, daily users were reported around 3.4 million in early 2026, up from…