DePIN Crypto Wheel
Tokens that paid somebody to mount real hardware on a real roof.
Press Spin. Every coin on the wheel has the same chance.
Your cryptocurrencies
The DePIN wheel picks one of twenty decentralised physical infrastructure tokens at random. These projects pay people in tokens to deploy real hardware — wireless hotspots, sensors, storage, mapping rigs — rather than buying it centrally.
The category with physical costs
Almost everything else in crypto is software all the way down. This is not. Somebody bought a device, mounted it on a roof or plugged it into a wall, and pays for power and connectivity every month. Tokens are the incentive that persuaded them to do it instead of a company buying the hardware centrally.
That anchoring to something outside the token makes the economics unusually legible. There is a real cost of deployment, a real cost of operation and, in principle, real demand at the other end. You can reason about whether the numbers work in a way you simply cannot for most categories.
Coverage is not demand
Here is the failure mode the category keeps rediscovering. Reward the deployment of hardware and you will get hardware deployed — a great deal of it, very quickly, in whatever configuration maximises the reward. That looks like enormous success on a coverage map.
Whether anyone is paying to use it is a separate question with a separate answer, and for several networks the honest answer has been "hardly anyone, yet". A network can be the most extensive of its kind in the world and still have negligible revenue, because the incentive paid for supply and the demand side was assumed.
What to check when the wheel lands
Find the revenue, not the coverage. Look for what users pay, in aggregate, separate from what the protocol emits in rewards. If emissions vastly exceed payments, the network is currently a subsidy programme, which is a reasonable stage to be at early and a difficult one to stay at.
That figure is usually published somewhere and rarely on the front page. Finding it is the work. The wheel picked a name out of twenty with equal probability and knows nothing about any of this.
What is on this wheel
| Rank | Ticker | Name |
|---|---|---|
| 32 | TAO | Bittensor |
| 50 | ICP | Internet Computer |
| 66 | RENDER | Render |
| 70 | FIL | Filecoin |
| 107 | BTT | BitTorrent [New] |
| 122 | ZBCN | Zebec Network |
| 134 | THETA | Theta Network |
| 140 | AKT | Akash Network |
| 150 | TRAC | OriginTrail |
| 151 | AR | Arweave |
| 166 | GEOD | GEODNET |
| 171 | GLM | Golem |
| 176 | EGLD | MultiversX |
| 181 | ATH | Aethir |
| 211 | BDX | Beldex |
| 253 | GRASS | Grass |
| 255 | RIF | Rootstock Infrastructure Framework |
| 275 | AIOZ | AIOZ Network |
| 278 | LPT | Livepeer |
| 285 | HOT | Holo |
Market data provided by CoinMarketCap — CoinMarketCap. Rank, ticker and name only; this site stores no prices.
This list is a judgement about what belongs in the category, not a market-cap ranking, so it carries no date. See how the lists are chosen.
Questions
Which coins are on the depin wheel?
All 20 of them are printed under the wheel: TAO, ICP, RENDER, FIL, BTT, ZBCN, THETA, AKT, TRAC, AR, GEOD, GLM, EGLD, ATH, BDX, GRASS, RIF, AIOZ, LPT and HOT. Stablecoins and wrapped tokens are left off, and you can replace the whole list in Custom mode.
What makes DePIN different from other crypto categories?
It has physical costs. Someone bought a device, mounted it somewhere and pays for power and connectivity. That anchors the economics to something outside the token in a way most categories are not.
Does the hardware get used?
That is the question the whole category turns on, and the answer differs sharply between projects. Coverage is not demand: a network can be extensively deployed and barely used, because the reward was for deploying.