DePIN Day Hong Kong: Recap of the First DePIN Day of 2025

The DePIN Day series is back! An opportunity to connect with teams and builders behind 200+ active projects and learn why the real world is looking to DePIN to address infrastructure challenges. These events are designed to foster discussions around the latest trends, challenges, and future prospects in the DePIN industry.

The most recent edition of DePIN Day took place on February 21st at the Blockchain Week in Hong Kong, a leading global hub for innovation, and was hosted by Fluence and Titan Network in partnership with io.net, Hivello, NodeOps, Impossible Cloud Network, and Mawari. The event provided a platform for insightful panel discussions and networking opportunities. To access all the talks, visit our YouTube channel.

TLDR:

• Titan Network - DePIN Web Services (Titan Network)
• io.net - The Internet of GPUS is Finally Here (io.net)
• Cloudless Computing With Fluence (Fluence) 
• Panel Discussion - DePIN & AI: Redefining the Future of Intelligent Infrastructure
• Helium - Own the Air (Helium)
• Satoshi’s Legacy (Auki Labs)
• Panel Discussion - Powering the Next Generation of Decentralized Infrastructure
• Orchestration Layer for DePIN (NodeOps)
• DePIN Technology - From NASA’s SETI’s Legacy to Modern Blockchain Infrastructure (Hivello)
• Panel Discussion - Investing in the Future of Decentralized Infrastructure
• DePIN for Spatial Computing (Mawari)
• Building the Protocol for a Decentralized Energy Grid (Sourceful Energy)
• Panel Discussion - Scaling DePIN: The Infrastructure Powering Decentralized Networks

📌  Titan Network — DePIN Web Services (Titan Network)

Titan network helps power companies like TikTok and Pnuts.ai, saving up to 75% over traditional web service infrastructure. River Davis, head of brand at Titan Network, kicked off DePIN DAY by sharing valuable insights on Titan Network, a DePIN web service provider powered by a decentralized user network that connects community cloud resources to Titan Network web services.

This platform offers storage compute and content delivery for enterprise-level businesses. Titan Network has two sides: The Install-to-earn involves turning idle resources like storage, bandwidth, and compute power from unused personal devices into rewards. The second model is the Titan web services that provide reliable, safe, and secure web infrastructure: storage, network, delivery, and compute. 

 📌 io.net — The Internet of GPUS is Finally Here (io.net)

The ingredient for a successful DePIN company is one that has a balanced set of builders who can build world-class platforms and experts who understand the crypto economics. Gurav Sharma, CTO at io.net, shared his view on the new era of Internet GPUs. 

In the early 2000s, opening a new branch or expanding to a new country was not the right way to efficiently scale; it had to be on the Internet. AI is at that point where companies who adapt AI into their workflow will be more relevant in the coming years.     

“In the coming years, there will be a demand shortage, where demand for GPUs will not be met with supply. This is because the CPUs in mobile phones are 10 to 20 times more powerful than the CPUs from 20 years ago,” explained Gurav.

io.net created the decentralized super cloud to enable distributed compute infrastructure, marketplaces, protocols, and governance, ensuring that value is communicated at every step. There is a massive amount of compute available, but consumers are not tapping into it as about 90% of the world's computing power is unused.

📌 Cloudless Computing With Fluence (Fluence) 

Fluence co-founder Evgeny Ponomarev provided an in-depth perspective on Cloudless computing with Fluence. The Fluence DePIN platform frees computation from centralized clouds by offering natively decentralized low-cost and verifiable compute. 

Traditional CPU infrastructure demand grows fast because the amount of data to collect and process is now more significant, especially for Edge and AI. “We are trying to build an alternative to big tech step by step,  from putting AI on DePIN and then large enterprises on DePIN,” explained Ponomarev.

Pricing is a key challenge, especially with hyperscaling companies. Cloud services are highly expensive making them unsuitable for long-term projects. Their high costs stem from market monopolies and pricing models that factor in profit margins, taxes, R&D expenses, and capital expenditures (CAPEX). On Fluence, customers enjoy stable crypto payment, open source and transparent development and the lowest possible pricing.  

📌 DePIN & AI: Redefining the Future of Intelligent Infrastructure

The panel discussion brought together a distinguished group of technologists and experts, including Ben Fielding (Gensyn), Mark Rydon (Aethir), Henry Wang (Open (RSS3)), Evgeny Ponomarev (Fluence) moderated by Benjamin Schiller (Coindesk). They explored reshaping the future of intelligent infrastructure with Artificial Intelligence.

The conversation opened with a focus on a centralised approach to AI development and how DePIN shapes the future of AI development. Mark highlighted that AI is viewed as very expensive and resource-intensive and exclusive to the majority of builders and companies with the best access to these resources build the best models. Aethir looks at ways to redistribute these resources to builders in a trustless manner to get high-performance products. 

Ben Fiedling highlighted the scalability of AI models, emphasising that expanding a model can enhance its performance, especially when combined with decentralisation. By leveraging virtual infrastructure, traditional scaling constraints can be eliminated, and scalability can be achieved. 

“We need an open-source model,  but we also need the infrastructure to be available, transparent, and not owned by the traditional clouds,” explained Ponomarev.

The panelists highlighted access to base models, heterogeneity of compute, and software stack problems common in centralized companies like Nvidia. Bandwidth, latency issues, and verification trust were also implicated as the key technical challenges between decentralized AI and centralized models. 

📌 Helium — Own the Air (Helium)

Telefonica Movistar is set to connect over 2 million subscribers in Mexico to Helium Infrastructure (Mobile Hotspots). Sam Lewis, Head of Capital Programs at Helium, shared insight on Helium's mission to enable anyone to build and own wireless networks. 

Helium began with the IoT network, the largest contiguous wireless network in the world for IoT with over 300,000 hotspots, connecting machines and sensors. The Helium Mobile network is the world’s largest decentralized Wi-Fi offload infrastructure, enabling mobile users to set up their mini-tower and helping the community build targeted, carrier-grade coverage anywhere on the globe. 

Helium is fast spreading outside the US, with major carriers in Mexico using the Helium Mobile Network. Helium Mobile has almost 400,000 users per day in the US, uploading over 20 TB of data daily. Telefonica Movistar came in as an interesting case study, as the 3rd largest carrier in Mexico onboarded a small set of production subscribers to test the effectiveness of the network and data offload. 

Helium IoT has grown rapidly, with 2.5 million data packets sent daily over the Helium IOT network, which is widely used by municipalities and government organisations, including the US Geological Survey and Pacific Gas & Electric. With real-world use cases like flood detection and alerting, waste management, and agriculture. 

 📌 Satoshi’s Legacy (Auki Labs)

Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of Bitcoin, will be remembered in history not just for creating Bitcoin but for igniting the decentralization movement that continues to reshape technology. 

Building on this vision, Nils Pihl, co-founder at Auki Labs, shared insights into how DePIN can give AI spatial awareness. While GPS relies on line-of-sight and struggles with height precision, DePIN projects like Geodnet improve GPS accuracy through real-time kinematics, extending its capabilities in outdoor spaces.

“70% of the world economy is still tied to real-world locations and physical labor. AI can only act using digital information; hence, it cannot help with human productivity until they are taught to navigate the real world.” explained Nils 

Our smartphones operate like robots, relying on sensors to perceive their environment, and relying on a robot’s perception to its sensors can be limiting. The solution lies in collaboration; if one robot has already mapped a location, it should seamlessly share that data, allowing others to navigate more efficiently with a more precise map.

📌 Powering the Next Generation of Decentralized Infrastructure

The following panel featured Zoey Zhang (GEODNET), Neil Chatterjee (DAWN / Andrena), Brian Lau (DePIN DAO), and Dirk Yuan (Cudis), moderated by Vadim Krekotin (MPost). The discussion kicked off with a deep dive into the challenges panelists have encountered while building for consumers and the strategies they’ve used to overcome them, enabling scalable growth to reach target users.

Brian highlighted scalability as a major challenge in contrast to traditional systems that can scale effortlessly. DePIN distributes data across multiple locations, complicating management since it serves as the sole anchor preventing data loss.

“There is an overlap between the demand side and supply side and in some other project, you are incentivizing retail to be an operator and then approach big enterprises to convince them to buy and get adopted in your workflow, is a key challenge that DePIN has to overcome,” explained Neil. 

The panel also explored how decentralised storage helps maintain efficiency. Zoey from Geodnet spoke about real-time data processing capability with instant geolocation detection, which helps address data latency as Geodnet provides accurate centimeter positioning data. Vadim highlighted the importance of real-time data, especially when doing geolocation or weather services. The only way for people to be incentivised to participate and own their data is through blockchain, which is transparent and immediate.

📌 Orchestration Layer for DePIN (NodeOps)

The key challenge with most DePIN projects is a reliable and secure compute network, ensuring the trustworthiness of the infrastructure provider and fragmented infrastructure tooling.

Naman Kabra, co-founder and CEO at NodeOps, shared insights into the orchestration layer for DePIN, the current challenges in the DePIN ecosystem, and the transition from traditional service to decentralised physical infrastructure. NodeOps began with the mission of providing a one-click layer for new DePIN users, 

“NodeOps brought in the entire trend of having Node-as-a-Service(NaaS) for retail, and today we have 75,000 active monthly users that are consistently deploying their nodes and further decentralized the network,” explained Naman. NodeOps Cloud is the permissionless DePIN marketplace for verifiable generalised compute and brings in DePIN supply from reliable cloud providers. 

Node Score, another metric introduced recently, defines how every machine is adhering to a specific benchmark that the DePIN providers have set. At NodeOps, the intent for us is to simplify the business logic for developers, ensuring that we help maintain the reliable network for them that can cater to real-time demand. 

📌 DePIN Technology — From NASA’s SETI’s Legacy to Modern Blockchain Infrastructure (Hivello)

The first DePIN was about 40 years ago, marking the beginning of decentralized physical infrastructure networks. It was pioneered by NASA, a research group called SETI, generating content from satellites and telescopes. They did not have the computing power to process all the data, and SETI came to solve the problem of compute. 

Domenic Carosa, founder of Hivello, walked us through NASA’s SETI’s Legacy, Hivello, the modern blockchain infrastructure. 

SETI was the perfect example of a decentralised compute launched in 1999, and DePIN is an evolution of the SETI’s model. Hivello is on a mission to make DePIN nodes accessible to every user, and they need to be mass-marketed on the supply side. The process is aggregation and orchestration, allowing customers to run multiple DePINs simultaneously with AI-based optimisations and payout in native DePIN stablecoin and cash. 

“With Hivello, we are able to appeal to both web2 and web3 users, and one of the big challenges in web3 is the focus on technology and how it works, which essentially does not interest the everyday user,” explained Domenic.

📌 Investing in the Future of Decentralized Infrastructure

The panel discussion brought together a distinguished group of venture capitalist and decision makers, including Solene Feuillu (Borderless), Jaou Toure (Huma Finance), Calvin Poon (The Spartan Group), moderated by Anna Tutova (Coinstelegram). They delved into the topic of investing in the future of decentralised infrastructure, as well as the risks, challenges, and reasons for interest from big enterprise players. 

The question began with why DePIN is attractive for investment and financing and what the key metrics are when considering projects for investment. Solene shared that DePIN has a lot of commonality with other companies; “you look at founders' background, market size, history of team working together previously, supply chain, and manufacturing”. Having good knowledge of tokenomics, being plugged into the community, and managing market makers and demand are the most important. 

The panelists expressed their enthusiasm for how DePIN projects are helpful. The demand for the products exists, and having a niche in a sector makes a lot more sense than a generalised DePIN. Jaou commented on projects being generally early and not having product maturity. Many mistakes and early experiments will be made in these projects, which is a key risk factor with smart contracts and programmable money with counter-party risk to ensure investors' funds are always safe. 

📌 DePIN for Spatial Computing (Mawari)

Centralized companies focus a lot on devices, not content, and consumer-grade XR content cannot be delivered to mobile XR devices due to technical bottlenecks and infrastructure limitations. 

Luis Ramirez, CEO & co-founder of Mawari, introduced Mawari, a DePIN protocol for spatial computing dedicated to accelerating extended reality. He discussed how Mawari powers digital humans and brings them to the real world. The Use Cases of the  3D AI Agents include more digitalised experiences and presentations and real-time edge AI. 

“We have an image of how the future will be (Instant, almost infinite, personalised and high quality), but it is not going to become mainstream if we do not have the same level of readiness and level of service as 2D content”, explained Luis and this is the reason for creating Mawari. 

We solved these limitations by creating a streaming format that is AR native and involves creating the entire rendering pipeline, like capturing, rendering, encoding, streaming, and decoding via a network. The Mawari stack contains the decentralised Mawari network, Mawari Engine, and spatial streaming SDK, allowing the technology to connect to the infrastructure. 

📌  Building the Protocol for a Decentralized Energy Grid (Sourceful Energy)

Fredrik Ahlgren, co-founder and CEO of Sourceful Energy, provided a unique perspective into building the protocol for a decentralised energy grid and shift in power system and how DePIN fits into the space. 

The Grid, the base layer of modern society, has been around for over 100 years and has been designed from centralized production (power plants) to consumer solar panels. This brings a new challenge as Solar PVs only produce when the Sun is shining without backup during the night time that could maybe be solved by more batteries and reserve powers. One way to make it work is to coordinate power all together and maintain a balance between power produced and power used. 

Fredrik provided a good perspective on the coordination problem and how we can solve this effectively on-chain. “We want to build that layer zero for the coordination and data problem, and the approach is to make this easily accessible for everyone.” He explained that DePIN products should be consumer products, but the demand side is a B2B product. 

“A single household battery equivalent to a Tesla power wall (10kWh) could earn about $4,000 per year and the reasons for these high prices is because we do not have coordination and everyone is acting independently in a broken system”. 

📌 Scaling DePIN: The Infrastructure Powering Decentralized Networks

DePIN has generated significant excitement, driven by its core components: physical infrastructure and virtual resource networks.

The last, but not certainly not least, panel discussion titled Scaling DePIN: The Infrastructure Powering Decentralized Networks, featuring technologists and experts, including Chris Chung (Impossible Cloud Network), Clara Tsao (Filecoin Foundation), River Davis (Titan Network), with the session moderated by Michael Sothan (DePIN Hub).

Micheal began the question with the layman definition of the cloud, compute, and the idea of a decentralised cloud. Clara, the founding officer from Filecoin, got the ground running by talking about the Cloud. Many businesses changed the way they store data during the era of the internet age as theory could now avoid running a local storage. 

They are now run by four companies that have now created a data monopoly. About 4oo million terabytes of data is produced daily, and 90% of the data was made in the last two years with demand for 1,000X more compute capacity for more storage. 

Chris from ICN emphasised the challenges in scaling DePIN for use cases like cloud and compute: “Traditionally, when you think about scale it is centralization with better performance and efficiency with decentralization care more about verifiability, security and agency for users at the cost of scale”. 

River from Titan Network spoke on latency and device capabilities, which is one of the mission at Titan Network with a focus on Edge devices, allowing users with idle devices to contribute ot the network. The issue is training large AI models that devices can't do because of latency and interoperability issues. 

Final Thoughts 

DePIN Day Hong Kong was filled with amazing panel discussions, exciting product updates,s and in-depth conversations on AI’s pivotal role in scaling decentralized physical infrastructure to a wider audience.

We would like to thank all our partners: Titan Network, io.net, Hivello, NodeOps, Impossible Cloud Network, and Mawari. Our Community partners DePIN Hub, Myosin, and 852E. 

Our media partners: Mpost, Crypto News, TechFlow, PAN News, Coinedition, U.today, Cryptopolitan, Chaincatcher, ​Foresight News, Blockbeats, Jinse, Tech Bullion, ​ZEXPRWire, Blocktides, Pacific Meta, Odaily, ​Digital Journal, Blocktempo, Bitcoin Addict, Blockstreet and Coinstelegram for helping us to make this event a success. 

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