Why Powering DePIN Services with Solana makes Business Sense

Global map showing decentralized blockchain nodes across different countries

A key focus for the DecentraTech Collective over the next year is DePIN – for Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks – which offer the promise of accelerating the build out time and reducing capital and operating costs for artificial intelligence infrastructure. Supporting that focus is the Collective’s Discovering DePIN series of online meetups, and a periodic Lighthouse Beacon blog posts.

Note: The DecentraTech Collective is an open community that advocates for technologies to enable decentralization. It is led by Lighthouse Partners and Massing PR. More information can be found here.

In a DePIN model, infrastructure – including compute, storage, bandwidth and sensor devices – is provided by large numbers of entities, typically including startups, small/medium enterprises, communities and individuals which make resources available (often part of the time or as a background task when it is underutilized for its primary use) to the DePIN operator. DePINs leverage blockchain technology to decentralize control and ownership and to reward (with crypto tokens) those that contribute to the network.

Solana Foundation’s Head of DePIN Amira Valliani

Following a preview DePIN 101 meetup, the Discovering DePIN series fully kicked off with How Solana is Powering DePIN, which featured a conversation and live Q&A with Amira Valliani, Head of DePIN at the Solana Foundation. Recordings of both meetups (and future ones) can be viewed here.

Amira’s role at the Solana Foundation is to support developers implementing DePIN projects by helping them connect with Solana Foundation resources, and other developers in the Solana ecosystem, and to promote them to the world at large. Check out Solana’s DePIN Quickstart Guide here.

Under development since 2017 and formally launched in March 2020, Solana is a high-performance Layer 1 permissionless blockchain that is recognized for its speed (averaging 400 milliseconds to finality of transactions), sustainability, with an efficient consensus algorithm that is a hybrid proof-of-history/proof-of-stake design, and low cost per transaction.

Solana also supports an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) implementation, allowing Ethereum applications and smart contracts to run on it without modification.

These attributes were cited by Amira as reasons why Solana has become popular for DePIN projects, which often are implemented on networks of lower-power devices and for applications where cost per transaction is especially important, which is often the case where individuals are contributing resources.

Solana already supports many DePIN projects – the results of a recent market analysis are available here – and Amira highlighted three of her favorites:

GEODNET - a decentralized network of GPS-like Global Navigation Satellite System reference stations that improve location accuracy. It aims to provide centimeter-level positioning accuracy and nano-second level time accuracy for applications like robotics by correcting GNSS signals for space weather and other errors. GEODNET incentivizes base station operators with the GEOD token.

Helium - a decentralized wireless network that enables individuals to deploy Hotspots and provide low-cost, secure connectivity for IoT and mobile devices. Individuals are rewarded with HNT tokens for expanding coverage and routing data. IoT applications include trackers (especially for dogs), medical sensors and agricultural data capture.

Hivemapper – a decentralized, community-driven mapping network that rewards individuals with HONEY tokens for collecting street-level imagery using dashcams. By turning everyday driving into a data source, Hivemapper produces fresher, more dynamic maps for sectors like transportation, logistics, and autonomous driving.

Looking at the bigger picture of DePIN and its future, Amira is keen that developers of DePIN-based services focus their marketing on promotion of business benefits, such as product functionality and capabilities, and cost savings, compared to those based on legacy centralized approaches. Simply aligning services with terms like “Web3” and “decentralization” is likely not the best route to take, she suggests. You can follow Amira’s wisdom on X here.