At DePIN Day Buenos Aires, Dylan Bane, Senior Enterprise Research Analyst at Messari, shared a grounded view of where the DePIN sector truly stands today. Despite broader market volatility and uneven performance across crypto, the energy on the ground tells a different story.
According to Dylan, the disconnect between price action and ecosystem momentum is striking. While markets may feel sluggish, builder activity, community engagement and real progress across DePIN protocols suggest the sector is quietly entering a more mature phase.
2025: The Year DePIN Started to Prove Itself
Looking back at 2025, Dylan described it as a turning point. After years of experimentation and narrative-building, several DePIN projects have begun to show tangible signs of product-market fit and scale.
Examples like Helium, which has grown to tens of millions in annual recurring revenue, and DoubleZero, which quickly captured a significant share of Solana’s mainnet stake, signal something important: DePIN is no longer just infrastructure theory. Some networks are now operating as revenue-generating systems with real demand.
This shift, Dylan emphasized, is what separates the current phase from earlier cycles dominated by hype.
Why Energy Is One of DePIN’s Biggest Opportunities
Among all DePIN verticals, energy stands out as one of the most promising and most complex. The reason is scale. Global energy infrastructure represents trillions of dollars in capital expenditure, driven by two simultaneous forces: the explosive growth of AI and compute demand, and the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
DePIN offers a unique coordination layer for this transition. By incentivizing individuals and communities to contribute energy—whether through solar panels or localized generation — networks can crowdsource infrastructure while aligning incentives through tokens and shared data.
While energy DePINs are difficult to bootstrap and operate, Dylan sees them as one of the clearest long-term opportunities in the sector.
AI, Compute & the Real Bottleneck
AI is impossible to ignore in any discussion about DePIN’s future. From Dylan’s perspective, decentralized AI has made the most progress on the infrastructure and research side, particularly in decentralized training and compute coordination.
However, real usage still lags behind. Most of 2025 was spent building foundational layers rather than deploying applications at scale. The core challenge is a capacity. For decentralized AI to become practical, DePIN compute networks must reliably provide sufficient uptime, availability, and scale.
Inference, in particular, could become significantly cheaper through decentralized compute. But unlocking that potential depends on whether DePIN networks can consistently deliver usable compute to end users.
Risks Are Practical
When asked about risks, Dylan pushed back on the idea that decentralized AI faces uniquely existential threats. Instead, most risks are operational and economic: ensuring enough compute supply, coordinating hardware efficiently, and delivering real utility to users.
The bigger risks lie in execution rather than ideology. If decentralized compute becomes useful, accessible and cost-effective, adoption will follow.
Looking Ahead: Lessons, TGEs, and a More Mature Sector
Looking toward 2026, Dylan expects the next phase of DePIN to be shaped by reflection and iteration. Many founders are revisiting token economics, incentive design, and go-to-market strategies based on real-world data gathered over the past two years.
Upcoming token generation events, continued scaling of existing networks, and expansion into new verticals suggest a sector learning from its mistakes rather than repeating them.
For Dylan, this is the most encouraging signal of all: DePIN is no longer just experimenting. It’s adapting and slowly, deliberately, moving toward sustainable fundamentals.
