Co-founder and CEO of Uplink
Carlos Lei
Co-founder and CEO of Uplink
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Everyone’s building AI applications, but nobody’s asking who’s going to run them. AI models need actual compute, bandwidth, and storage, not just code and hype. Last year, I watched DePIN move from a narrative into a clear answer to this infrastructure gap. As a result, the market stopped rewarding projects for their narratives and started demanding actual metrics: revenue per node, utilization rates, and paying customers.
This transition was defined by three key developments. First, the physical networks saw rapid growth, with the number of IoID-registered devices surging nearly 450% during 2025. Second, DePINs generate real, verifiable income, as weekly protocol revenue jumped over 258% to $443,770 by year-end.
Now, as we enter 2026, the challenge is no longer about proving the concept. It’s about demonstrating that these networks can scale as sustainable businesses with solid unit economics, binding contracts, and predictable quality.
The 2026 DePIN Market Map
DePIN is a diverse market of operational networks solving real problems across multiple industries. As of January 19, 2026, the DePIN market cap stood at $11.1 billion, a figure that only accounts for projects with publicly traded tokens, leaving much of the sector’s value still unpriced.
The market’s recent performance tells a story of divergence between speculation and fundamentals. While the sector lost about 80% of its token value in 2025, the year ended with a strong start for fundamentals-driven projects. RENDER, for example, surged 62% year-to-date in early 2026, with tokens like AR and AKASH also posting double-digit gains.
What I see is that DePIN grew beyond being a simple theory in 2025. These networks are up and running, and the progress is evident across different sub-sectors.
In wireless networks, we have surpassed 5 million registered routers worldwide, and it recorded a 23% increase in customers in collaboration with a Fortune 500 company, proving real enterprise demand.
In mapping, Hivemapper’s network has now covered over 700 million km of roads, or about 37% of the global road network, backed by a recent $32 million funding round. And in compute, Akash is generating over $4.3 million in annual recurring revenue, with demand maturing toward longer-lived, higher-priced deployments for serious AI workloads.
That’s the clearest proof that DePIN is now operating as real infrastructure. The question is no longer how many routers you can register. Instead, it’s how much real traffic you can serve, at measurable quality, for paying customers.
In 2026, we’ll see the winners separate by utilization, reliability, and commercial contracts, not by token noise.
7 Theses for a Maturing Market
With these shifts in mind, here’s what I’m watching for in 2026.
First, DePIN will become an essential AI infrastructure layer. Think of it this way: AI is the storefront; DePIN is the supply chain. Centralized providers simply cannot keep up.
Second, networks with clear unit economics will win, with key performance indicators like revenue per active node and utilization rates becoming the new standard.
Furthermore, enterprise demand will be proven through concrete contracts, such as telco offload deals and B2B data agreements, not just press releases.
The regulatory environment is also set to become less toxic for tokens with real-world use cases, with the dismissal of the SEC’s claims against Nova Labs serving as a key precedent.
At the same time, sector consolidation will begin as vertical stacks emerge, such as mapping networks integrating directly with autonomous vehicle data pipelines.
Finally, a macro shift towards utility, seen in the rise of stablecoins and RWAs, aligns perfectly with DePIN’s infrastructure focus.
2026 is the year DePIN lays the foundation for its long-term opportunity, with the market projected to reach $3.5 trillion by 2028.
The Unseen Forces Moving DePIN Forward
Beyond these observable trends, I see many powerful undercurrents that are making DePIN’s rise a near certainty. AI’s relentless resource scarcity makes a decentralized supply chain an economic necessity.
Declining trust in tech giants and monopolies, highlighted by events like November’s global Cloudflare outage, creates urgent demand for resilient alternatives. The commoditization of hardware like sensors and routers means the crowd can now build infrastructure faster and more affordably than large corporations.
Simultaneously, stablecoins have become the perfect fuel for the high-volume, global microtransactions needed to instantly compensate millions of DePIN network contributors. A maturing market will also increasingly shift to a cash-flow story, ignoring projects that cannot demonstrate real revenue.
Finally, simplified on-chain accounting, which provides verifiable proof of work, makes DePIN networks transparent, auditable, and ultimately more attractive for B2B adoption and insurance.
These forces are fundamental economic and technological shifts. They signal that the move toward decentralized infrastructure is not a matter of if, but when. The market is maturing, the tools are ready, and the demand is undeniable. And I believe 2026 will be the year these hidden drivers become visible to everyone.
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