Bandwidth DePIN
Also: Bandwidth sharing network · AI data DePIN · Grass
A DePIN category in which participants share the unused capacity of an ordinary internet connection, and buyers pay for distributed access to the public web.
Every other DePIN category asks its participants to buy something first — a GPU, a drive array, a radio, a grid connection. Bandwidth DePIN asks for none of it. The asset is the connection already in the building, and the part of it nobody is using.
Why anyone pays for it
Training and evaluating a model requires current material from the open web, and the open web answers a datacentre address differently from an ordinary household one. Reach through many ordinary connections is therefore worth money, and building that footprint directly is slow and expensive. A network of volunteers assembles it in months rather than years.
What the participant is measured on
- Availability — how much of the time the device is connected at all.
- Throughput actually used — bandwidth the network routes through the device, which depends on demand rather than on effort.
- Location — reach is not worth the same everywhere, so neither are the rewards.
The largest example
Grass is the network that established the category, with more than 8.5 million participants. It runs as a background application, credits Uptime Points for availability and Network Points for bandwidth used, and settles in Grass Tokens and USDC. This publication runs a node on it and publishes the result.
How to read the numbers
Dashboards in this category report points, not currency. Points convert at a distribution whose rate is not fixed in advance, so any page quoting a guaranteed daily income in dollars is quoting something it invented. The honest measure is the points themselves, and the uptime that produced them.