2025 became a defining year for Fluence. It was the year Fluence quietly finished laying the foundation for something much bigger. While much of the industry continued to debate what decentralized infrastructure could be, Fluence focused on making sure it actually worked.
To close the year, Fluence co-founders Tom Trowbridge and Evgeny Ponomarev sat down to reflect on what was built, why certain decisions mattered, and how those foundations set the stage for what comes next.
A Full CloudStack
Fluence didn’t start 2025 with the ambition to replace the cloud. It started with a much narrower idea — decentralized compute primitives.
Over time, that approach proved too limited for real-world usage. Production workloads don’t run on abstractions alone. They need virtual machines, predictable networking, orchestration, and reliability. That realization led to a decisive shift.
Over the course of the year, Fluence evolved into a full DePIN CloudStack: production-ready CPU virtual machines, a rebuilt provider stack, and an infrastructure layer capable of supporting real workloads at scale — not demos, not experiments.
This mattered because CPU virtual servers remain rare in DePIN. Most decentralized compute projects specialize in narrow workloads. Fluence deliberately went the other way, building general-purpose infrastructure that looks familiar to developers, but runs on decentralized hardware.
Why Third-Party Node Providers Became the First Real Market
Once the product matured, the next question was obvious: who actually needs this? The answer turned out to be third-party node providers — companies running blockchain nodes for protocols and ecosystems. For them, compute is the core cost driver.
Roughly half of a node provider’s operating expenses come from compute. Most of that compute still runs on centralized clouds. That creates both economic pressure and structural risk.
Fluence offered something different:
- lower compute costs,
- decentralized infrastructure,
- and a model aligned with the values of Web3 itself.
That focus quickly became tangible. By the end of 2025, Fluence was working with live customers in this segment and building a pipeline measured not in theory, but in real contracts.
GPUs, AI and the Next Wave of Demand
The expansion into GPUs was a continuation. As AI workloads reshaped global infrastructure demand, it became clear that compute growth would increasingly be driven by GPUs. Fluence responded by rolling out GPU containers, GPU virtual machines, and bare metal options — aggregated across providers to maximize supply diversity and geographic reach.
Different users need different models:
- short-term, on-demand access,
- long-running reserved capacity,
- high-throughput AI workloads,
- hybrid CPU–GPU environments.
Fluence built for all of it, positioning itself where demand is heading.
Compute as a Commodity
One of the most important ideas emerging from the Fluence founders’ conversation: compute is becoming a commodity. Like energy or bandwidth, compute is scarce, valuable, and increasingly tradable. It can be consumed, reserved, invested in, and optimized over time.
Fluence’s position is unusual because it exposes it. By operating directly at the infrastructure layer, the protocol can design economic mechanisms around real capacity rather than speculative demand. This perspective shapes everything from pricing to token design.
Token Economics Grounded in Reality
For Fluence, token economics are part of the go-to-market strategy. On the CPU side, providers receive stablecoin payments from customers alongside FLT rewards for idle capacity. Those rewards are capped and vested, preventing inflation while allowing providers to operate at lower prices. At the same time, capacity proofs ensure that the network knows exactly how much compute is available at any moment.
Staking plays a functional role as well. Capacity must be staked per CPU, meaning that network growth directly requires more stake. As more customers come online, more compute is activated and demand for FLT grows organically as a consequence of usage, not speculation.
Planned improvements, such as staking to provider pools instead of individual machines, are designed to make participation simpler without changing the underlying risk profile.
Scaling Revenue
By the end of 2025, Fluence had done what many protocols postpone: it stopped optimizing for storylines and started optimizing for revenue.
The year was spent improving products, expanding into GPUs, and building a meaningful customer pipeline. The next phase is straightforward, if not easy — closing that pipeline and scaling.
In Fluence’s model, business growth and token demand are mechanically linked. More customers require more active compute. More active compute requires more stake. Token economics follow usage, not the other way around.
Why Web3 Infrastructure Can’t Live on Centralized Clouds
Despite years of decentralization rhetoric, a large share of L1 nodes still run on centralized cloud providers. That creates a single point of failure — technical, political and regulatory.
An outage, policy change, or external pressure can suddenly affect entire networks. Fluence’s partnerships with L1 ecosystems, including TON, are driven by this realization. Running decentralized networks on decentralized infrastructure is a structural necessity.
DePIN as an Ecosystem
Throughout 2025, Fluence invested heavily in the DePIN ecosystem through DePIN Day events and the DePINed Podcast. These weren’t branding exercises. They were infrastructure for the community itself — spaces where founders, builders, and operators could exchange knowledge and build trust.
That investment paid off in the most practical way possible: customers emerged directly from the ecosystem. With partners like Protocol Labs, Fluence continues to treat ecosystem building as part of its infrastructure strategy.
About DePINed Podcast
DePINed is a podcast exploring the frontier of decentralized physical infrastructure, hosted by Tom Trowbridge, co-founder of Fluence. Each episode features in-depth conversations with founders, builders, and investors who are shaping the future of real-world Web3 networks.
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