DePIN
Also: Decentralised Physical Infrastructure Networks
Networks that coordinate privately owned physical hardware — GPUs, storage, wireless capacity — into a shared marketplace, with settlement on-chain.
The proposition is that capacity already exists and is idle, and that a market plus settlement can put it to work without anybody building a datacentre. For compute specifically, the appeal rises whenever accelerators are scarce.
What determines whether it competes
Not price per hour but the whole delivered cost: scheduling quality, interconnect, and power. A scheduler change alone has been shown to move utilisation from 53.6% to 87.0% on identical hardware — an efficiency swing larger than most price differences between providers.
The number that governs the market
Availability timelines of purpose-built silicon set the ceiling. A chip that wins on throughput per megawatt but arrives in volume only at the end of a year does not change that year's capacity — it changes the year after. Anyone modelling compute supply should watch ramp dates more closely than benchmark charts.