DePIN

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Investing in Outcomes

We have journeyed from the personal story behind GrowGood to the way its Blueprints learn to speak the language of your farm. Now, we arrive at the most crucial part of our conversation: the future we can grow together. This is a vision that extends beyond the farm gate, connecting our individual efforts into a powerful, collective force for regeneration.

The Things Network South Australia

In a world dominated by centralised, corporate-owned networks, what if we could build our own? What if the infrastructure for the Internet of Things (IoT)—the very network that connects our sensors to the digital world—was owned and operated by the community it serves?

Part 4: A Different Path for LoRaWAN

In the history of technology, there are forks in the road. Moments where a different choice, a different philosophy, could have led us to a profoundly different world. In this series, we’ve explored the degenerative path taken by many DePIN projects, with Helium as a case study—a project that captured the incredible energy of a community-built network, only to see that energy diverted down a familiar, extractive path. This is the degenerative trajectory toward techno-feudalism, where centralization and extraction create scarcity and render the network’s builders into a surplus population.

Part 1: The Reality of DePIN

The Seductive Pitch The term DePIN, or Decentralised Physical Infrastructure Networks, carries an almost utopian promise. It paints a picture of a world where the essential physical networks we rely on—from wireless and mobile connectivity to mapping and sensor data—are built not by faceless corporations, but by us. It’s a vision of grassroots collaboration, where individuals are empowered to deploy hardware, share resources, and collectively own the infrastructure of tomorrow.

Part 2: DePIN's Fork in the Road

A Pattern Emerges The story of Helium, as I detailed in my first post, is not an anomaly. The slide from a grand vision of a “People’s Network” into a centrally-controlled system that primarily benefits its founders and a small handful of insiders is, unfortunately, a well-trodden path in the DePIN space. The issues of opaque governance, extractive tokenomics, and a disregard for the actual community that builds the network are not bugs; they are features of a flawed and deeply ingrained model.

Part 3: From Degenerative to Regenerative

The Principles Are Sound After dissecting the broken models of the DePIN space, it would be easy to become cynical and dismiss the entire concept as a failed experiment. But that would be a mistake.