DEPIN：分散的物理基础设施

Grayscale在今年年初写了一份有关Depin的研究报告。上表显示了最高的DEPIN项目及其市场价值。

Author: Jiawei @IOSG

作者：jiawei @iosg

Grayscale wrote a research report on DePIN at the beginning of this year. The table above shows the top DePIN projects and their market value. Since 2022, DePIN and AI have been mentioned as two new directions for Crypto investment. However, there seems to be no iconic project in the DePIN field. (Helium is considered a top project, but Helium appeared even earlier than the concept of DePIN; Bittensor, Render, and Akash in the table are more classified as AI tracks)

Grayscale在今年年初写了一份有关Depin的研究报告。上表显示了最高的DEPIN项目及其市场价值。自2022年以来，Depin和AI被提及是加密投资的两个新方向。但是，在迪卡特领域似乎没有标志性的项目。 （氦气被认为是一个顶级项目，但氦气甚至比depin的概念更早；桌子上的bittensor，渲染和阿卡什更加分类为AI轨道）

It seems that DePIN does not have a strong enough leading project to open the ceiling of this track. The DePIN track may still have some Alpha in the next 1-3 years.

似乎Depin没有足够强大的领先项目来打开这首歌的天花板。在接下来的1 - 3年中，Depin Track可能仍然有一些Alpha。

This article attempts to sort out the investment logic of DePIN from scratch, including why DePIN is an investment track worthy of our attention, and proposes a simple analysis framework. Since DePIN is a comprehensive concept covering many diverse sub-tracks, this article will zoom out a little and explain the concept from an abstract perspective, but will still give some specific examples.

本文试图从头开始汇总Depin的投资逻辑，包括为什么Depin是值得我们注意的投资轨道，并提出了一个简单的分析框架。由于Depin是一个涵盖许多不同子轨道的综合概念，因此本文将放大一点，并从抽象的角度解释该概念，但仍将给出一些具体的例子。

Why pay attention to DePIN investment

为什么要注意Depin Investment

DePIN is not a buzz word

Depin不是一个流行语

First of all, it is important to make it clear that decentralizing the infrastructure of the physical world is not a fancy idea, nor is it just a simple "narrative play", but it can be implemented. In DePIN, there are indeed scenarios where decentralization can "enable" something or "optimize" something.

首先，重要的是要清楚地表明，将物理世界的基础结构分散不是一个奇特的想法，也不只是一个简单的“叙事游戏”，而是可以实现的。在Depin中，确实在某些情况下，权力下放可以“启用”某物或“优化”某些东西。

Here are two simple examples:

这是两个简单的例子：

In the telecommunications field, a major track in DePIN, taking the US market as an example, traditional communication operators (such as AT&T and T-Mobile) often need to invest billions of dollars in spectrum license auctions and base station deployment, and then pay $200,000 to $500,000 in deployment costs for each macro base station with a coverage radius of 1-3 kilometers. In an auction of 5G spectrum in the 3.45GHz band by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2022, AT&T invested $9 billion, becoming the operator with the highest investment. This centralized infrastructure model leads to high prices for communication services.

在电信领域，以美国的主要轨道为例，以美国市场为例，传统的通信运营商（例如AT＆T和T-Mobile）通常需要投资数十亿美元用于Spectrum许可拍卖和基地车站的部署，然后支付200,000美元至500,000美元的售票费用，每位Macro Base Station的部署成本为1-3千米级的每一个Macro Base Station。在2022年，联邦通信委员会（FCC）在3.45GHz乐队中拍卖5G频谱中，AT＆T投资了90亿美元，成为拥有最高投资的运营商。这种集中的基础设施模型可为通信服务提供高昂的价格。

Helium Mobile, through community crowdsourcing, spreads this early cost to each user. Individuals only need to purchase a hotspot device for $249 or $499 to access the network and become a "micro-operator". Through token incentives, the community can spontaneously build a network, thereby reducing overall investment. The cost of deploying a macro base station for Verizon is about $200,000, while Helium can achieve similar coverage by deploying about 100 hotspot devices (total cost of about $50,000), reducing costs by about 75%.

氦气手机通过社区众包，将这笔早期成本传播给每个用户。个人只需要以249美元或499美元的价格购买热点设备即可访问网络并成为“微型操作员”。通过令牌激励措施，社区可以自发地建立网络，从而减少整体投资。为Verizon部署宏观基站的成本约为20万美元，而氦气可以通过部署约100个热点设备（总成本约为50,000美元）来实现类似的承保范围，从而将成本降低了约75％。

In addition, in the field of AI data, traditional AI companies need to pay up to $300 million per year in API fees to platforms such as Reddit and Twitter to obtain training data, and crawl data with the help of Bright Data (residential agent) and Oxylabs (data center agent). Not only that, they are also facing more and more copyright and technical restrictions, and the compliance and diversity of data sources are difficult to guarantee.

此外，在AI数据领域，传统的AI公司需要每年向Reddit和Twitter等平台支付高达3亿美元的API费用，以获取培训数据，并借助明亮的数据（住宅代理）和OxylAbs（数据中心代理）抓取数据。不仅如此，他们还面临越来越多的版权和技术限制，数据源的合规性和多样性也很难保证。

Grass has solved this dilemma through distributed Web Scraping, allowing users to share idle bandwidth by downloading browser extensions, helping to crawl public web page data and receive token rewards from it. This model greatly reduces the AI companies' data acquisition costs while achieving data diversity and geographical distribution. According to Grass statistics, there are currently 109,755,404 IP addresses from 190 countries participating in the network, contributing an average of 1,000 TB of Internet data per day.

Grass通过分布式的网络刮擦解决了这一难题，使用户可以通过下载浏览器扩展名来共享空闲的带宽，从而帮助抓取公共网页数据并从中获得令牌奖励。该模型大大降低了AI公司的数据采集成本，同时实现了数据多样性和地理分布。根据Grass统计数据，目前有109,755,404个IP地址来自190个国家 /地区参与该网络，平均每天贡献1,000 TB的互联网数据。

In summary, the basic starting point for investing in DePIN is that decentralized physical infrastructure has the opportunity to do better than traditional physical infrastructure, and even do things that traditional methods cannot do.

总而言之，投资于Depin的基本起点是，分散的物理基础设施有机会比传统的物理基础架构做得更好，甚至可以做传统方法无法做的事情。

As the intersection of Infra and Consumer

作为中等和消费者的交汇处

As the two main lines of Crypto investment, Infra and Consumer each face some problems.

作为加密投资的两个主要线条，下属和消费者都面临一些问题。

Infra projects generally have two characteristics: First, they are very technical. For example, technologies such as ZK, FHE, and MPC have very high barriers to entry, and there is a certain disconnect in market perception. Second, except for the familiar Layer1/2, cross-chain bridges, pledges and other projects that can directly reach end users, most Infra are actually toB. For example, developer tools, data availability layers, oracles, coprocessors, etc. are relatively far away from users.

下属项目通常具有两个特征：首先，它们非常技术性。例如，诸如ZK，FHE和MPC之类的技术具有很高的进入障碍，并且市场感知有一定的脱节。其次，除了熟悉的layer1/2，跨链桥，承诺和其他可以直接覆盖最终用户的项目外，大多数下属实际上都是TOB。例如，开发人员工具，数据可用性层，甲壳，协处理器等与用户相对较远。

These two points make it difficult for Infra projects to promote users’ mindshare and have poor dissemination. Although high-quality Infra has a certain PMF and income and can be self-sufficient through the cycle, in a market where attention is scarce, the lack of mindshare makes it difficult for listing in the later

这两个方面使得中印度项目很难促进用户的思维方式和传播不佳。尽管高质量的下属具有一定的PMF和收入，并且可以在整个周期中自给自足，但在关注的市场中，缺乏思维份额使得很难在后来的列表中列出