DePin: An Important Pillar of Future Web3

Decentralized Physical Infrastructure (DePin) is an emerging sector that, while not as intuitive as public chains, DeFi, or MEME, may have more extensive and far-reaching application scenarios. The uniqueness of DePin mainly lies in two aspects: the diversity of business fields and service targets, as well as the difficulty of data acquisition.

The DePin project involves multiple fields such as cloud computing, cloud rendering, file storage, network hotspots, and even meteorology. Its service targets are not limited to the Web3 ecosystem. For example, a decentralized cloud computing platform in the fields of AI training and inference, as well as game computing, has already provided cloud computing services to numerous Web2 enterprises. Another geographic and meteorological data information platform based on GNSS satellite reference stations is dedicated to providing services for agriculture, engineering, transportation, and geology.

Due to the significant differences between DePin projects and the fact that the main work may not be executed on the blockchain, the data in this track is often overlooked. Recently, a DePin project established a deep collaboration with a data aggregation platform, creating a smart contract registry on-chain to identify various behaviors and data of the project on-chain, thereby achieving standardized computation of its on-chain data.

DePin Project Data Comparison Analysis

Demand Side

From the perspective of protocol fees and protocol revenue, a certain cloud computing power platform has generated a total of 58.7 million USD in protocol fees over the past year, accounting for 5.7% of the infrastructure market share. The protocol fees of this platform show a growth trend and have a low correlation with the fluctuations in the Web3 market, mainly because its clients and revenue sources primarily come from Web2 sector gaming companies and AI enterprises.

In terms of protocol revenue, the platform has accumulated dividends of 22.2 million USD over the past year, with retained protocol revenue of 36.5 million USD. Compared to other DePin projects, excluding public chain types, the platform ranks first in both protocol fees and protocol revenue.

Supply Side

The number of active nodes reflects the service capacity and total cost of the DePin network. Among GPU types, a certain cloud computing platform has the highest number of active nodes, far exceeding other similar projects. Among cloud service types, Ethereum has the highest number of nodes.

Ecological Integration

The number of active addresses is an important indicator of network value. In the GPU computing-based DePin projects, a certain cloud computing platform leads in the number of active addresses.

Potential Value Analysis

By comparing the fully diluted valuation (FDV) with the ratios of protocol fees, protocol revenue, active nodes, and active addresses, it is found that a certain cloud computing power platform shows signs of being potentially undervalued across multiple dimensions. This undervaluation may stem from its unique business model and sources of revenue.

Conclusion

The DePin projects, especially those platforms that primarily serve areas outside of Web3, demonstrate a unique value proposition. Their revenue is less correlated with the fluctuations of the cryptocurrency market, showing a trend of stable growth. More importantly, the ability of these projects to generate revenue from non-Web3 fields brings new channels of capital inflow to the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem, which could become an important pillar for the future development of Web3.