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DePIN after Helium: what the model can and can't do
@blockonomist
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2026-05-16 13:44:05
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Helium was the first DePIN project most people heard about, and its trajectory — dramatic rise, HNT token collapse, business model pivot to cellular (Helium Mobile) — is the clearest case study we have for what this model actually does. What it did well: bootstrapped a physical network faster than a traditional telecom could. The token incentive genuinely brought hardware online at scale. For LoRaWAN IoT coverage, it worked. What went wrong: token emissions outpaced real demand for network services. The circular economy (mine HNT → sell HNT → buy miners → mine more HNT) worked until it didn't. The "we'll find enterprise customers" plan never materialized at the scale needed. The broader DePIN thesis — that token incentives can bootstrap physical infrastructure — is still interesting. Render Network for GPU compute, Hivemapper for map data, Filecoin for storage. But Helium's lesson applies: token economics need to be anchored to actual service demand from the start, not added later.
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