Phygital Mycelium
OS Module: Infrastructure — Who owns the invisible signals determines who captures the value
Extends The Tight Five series
What signals are flowing through the air around you right now?
GPS corrections. WiFi handshakes. LoRaWAN pings from sensors you've never seen. Satellite fixes accurate to the centimetre. Weather readings. Foot traffic counts. Electromagnetic whispers carrying data worth billions — invisible, constant, everywhere.
You walk through this every day. You can't see it. But someone owns it.
A farmer bolts a GPS receiver to his barn roof. It costs four hundred dollars. The receiver talks to satellites and sends correction data to a protocol called GEODNET. Surveyors, drone operators, self-driving tractors — they buy that data. The protocol pays the farmer in tokens. He does nothing else. The hardware works. The data flows through the air. The money comes.
This is the phygital mycelium. The invisible network of signals that carries everything. Like fungal threads beneath a forest floor — you can't see it, but nothing grows without it.
Forget the name DePIN. Watch what happens.
Community deploys hardware. Protocol verifies output. Users pay for the service. Tokens flow back to operators. Operators deploy more hardware. The loop compounds.
COMMUNITY DEPLOYS → PROTOCOL VERIFIES → USERS CONSUME → TOKENS REWARD
↑ ↓
└────────────── More hardware, better service ──────────┘
This is not a sector. It is a coordination pattern. The most revolutionary things always arrive dressed as accounting.
The Pattern
Helium did it with wireless. 335,000 hotspots across 190 countries. 450,000 mobile subscribers. AT&T offloads traffic onto a network that regular people built. Nobody in a boardroom planned it.
GEODNET did it with positioning — centimetre-level accuracy from rooftop sensors, not government satellites. Glow did it with solar — 70 farms from California to India, $25M in annual revenue, where every dollar of electricity goes back into the protocol. Each $1 invested generates $20 of new solar infrastructure. io.net did it with GPU compute — idle graphics cards finding work across continents.
Same pattern. Different hardware. Same result: communities building what corporations wouldn't.
The Five Layers
Not all infrastructure is equal. The layers stack, and each captures value differently.
| Layer | What It Provides | Who Builds It | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sensors | Real-world data | Device operators | GEODNET, 375ai |
| Connectivity | Network access | Hotspot deployers | Helium, Double Zero |
| Compute | Processing power | GPU contributors | Bittensor, io.net |
| Storage | Data persistence | Disk providers | Filecoin, Arweave |
| Energy | Power generation | Solar operators | Glow |
A precision agriculture system needs sensors (soil moisture), connectivity (LoRaWAN), compute (ML inference), and storage (historical data). Today that means four vendors, four contracts, four points of failure. With DePIN it means four token-incentivized networks that interoperate because their protocols are open and their data is verifiable.
The strongest plays control the sensor layer. Connectivity is commoditising. Compute is abundant. But unique, verified, real-world data from hardware you operate — that's the moat.
Permissionless Hardware
Code and media are permissionless leverage — they scale without more of your time. DePIN adds a third form: permissionless hardware.
Deploy a GEODNET receiver and you've created a physical asset that earns while you sleep. Unlike code, it generates real-world data that cannot be replicated by a competitor at a keyboard. Unlike media, its value is verified by physics, not algorithms.
| Leverage | What It Scales | What's Scarce |
|---|---|---|
| Code | Ideas | Nothing — infinitely copyable |
| Media | Reputation | Attention |
| Hardware | Location | Physical position — one rooftop, one street corner |
Hardware compounds with physical scarcity. There is only one position on Earth where your GEODNET station sits. Only one rooftop where your solar array generates. Only one street corner where your 375ai sensor measures foot traffic.
Specific knowledge that cannot be copied. That is the definition of a moat.
The ABCD Stack
DePIN is the D in ABCD — the physical foundation that makes the other three layers real.
Without D, AI trains on synthetic data and hallucinated inputs. Without D, blockchain verifies nothing physical. Without D, crypto incentivizes speculation instead of contribution.
AI learns from sensor data
↓
Blockchain proves contributions and ownership
↓
Crypto aligns incentives through tokens
↓
DePIN distributes the physical layer
↓
Better data feeds back to AI
Agents need instruments. Intelligence needs constraint. The digital world needs roots in the physical one.
DePIN closes the loop. It grounds the stack in reality.
The Health Metric
Every DePIN network has one number that determines whether it lives or dies: the revenue-to-emission ratio.
When a network generates more revenue from real users than it emits in token rewards, the flywheel is self-sustaining. When it doesn't, it is a subsidy burning down.
| Network | Revenue Signal | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Glow | $25M ARR across 70 solar farms | Real cash flow |
| GEODNET | Selling precision data to agriculture, construction, autonomy | Real demand |
| Helium | AT&T partnership, 300% subscriber growth | Proving out |
The question for any DePIN investment is not "will the token go up?" It is: does real demand exceed token inflation? Everything else is noise.
The Trillion-Dollar Proof
Advertising is a trillion-dollar industry where middlemen take forty to fifty cents of every dollar. Click farms inflate traffic. Impression counts are modelled estimates pretending to be facts. Publishers — the ones who made the thing people came to see — get what's left.
DePIN does not protest the duopoly. It simply makes the duopoly irrelevant. You can imprison a revolutionary, but you cannot imprison a better unit cost.
Stack the pieces:
375ai sensors verify that a real human stood in front of that billboard. Not a modelled estimate. A cryptographically verified warm body. The person who owns the sensor owns the truth.
GEODNET gives that sensor centimetre-level position. No spoofing.
Sui settles the transaction in under a second. Not thirty days. Not ninety days. Now.
Alkimi runs the ad exchange on-chain. Every bid visible. Every payment auditable.
Publishers get ninety cents on the dollar instead of fifty. That is not an improvement. That is a different industry.
The Industry Map
Advertising is the proof. It is not the limit. DePIN rewires how every industry sources data and settles value.
| Industry | DePIN Application | What Changes |
|---|---|---|
| Advertising | Verified impression measurement | Ground truth replaces modelled estimates |
| Agriculture | Precision farming sensors | Hyper-local data replaces regional averages |
| Energy | Peer-to-peer solar trading | Community generation replaces utility monopoly |
| Telecom | Community wireless coverage | Demand-driven deployment replaces carrier capex |
| Real Estate | Building sensor networks | Properties generate and monetize their own data |
| Logistics | Supply chain verification | On-chain tracking replaces trust-me paperwork |
The pattern repeats: whoever controls the sensor controls the signal. Whoever controls the signal controls the prediction. Whoever controls the prediction controls the workflow.
Every category of physical infrastructure where the coordination cost exceeds the hardware cost is a DePIN opportunity.
The Decade View
In 2015, communities building wireless networks that rival carriers would have been dismissed. Helium proved it. In 2020, community-owned solar farms generating $25M coordinated by a protocol would have been called utopian. Glow proved it.
Telecom was first. Energy and positioning are proving out now. Advertising measurement is next.
The Hard Questions
Before you deploy capital or hardware:
- Is the data unique? If anyone can replicate the sensor network cheaply, there's no moat.
- Does the token have to exist? If the network works better with a database, the token is marketing.
- Who pays for the service? Token emissions are not revenue. Someone outside the network must value the output.
- What happens at maturity? When token incentives taper, does real demand sustain operators?
- Can it survive regulation? If a single jurisdiction can kill the network, it's not decentralized.
These are not pessimistic questions. They are the questions that separate infrastructure from theatre.
The Question
Who should own the infrastructure that everyone depends on?
The answer has always been: whoever had enough capital to build it first. Railroad barons. Oil companies. Telecoms. Cloud providers. Capital builds. Capital owns. Capital extracts.
DePIN flips the answer. Communities build. Protocols verify. Everyone owns.
The tools exist. The hardware is cheap. The protocols are live. The loop is turning.
The only thing more dangerous than an idea whose time has come is a spreadsheet that proves it.
Playbook
| Priorities | Question | DePIN Answer |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Why does this matter? | Infrastructure ownership determines who captures value in the AI era |
| Principles | What truths guide you? | Community coordination outcompetes corporate deployment at the edge |
| Platform | What do you control? | Your hardware, your data, your stake in the network |
| Perspective | What do you see others don't? | DePIN is a pattern, not a sector — applies everywhere hardware meets incentives |
| Performance | How do you know it's working? | Revenue/emission ratio, active nodes, real demand not speculation |
Dig Deeper
- Phygital Mycelium — Capabilities — The engineering layer: PRDs, ventures, and shared primitives
- Phygital Marketing — Where physical and digital experiences merge
- DePIN Architecture — How the physical layer works
- DePIN Token Evaluations — Individual project analysis
- DePIN Devices — Hardware you can buy and operate
- DePIN Investment Thesis — Scorecard and prediction framework
- DePIN Business Models — The operational playbook
- Advertising Platform — Web3 ad stack: Sui, 375ai, GEODNET, Alkimi
- AI Data Industry — The data flywheel DePIN powers
- Information Arbitrage — Why data ownership creates value
- Feedback Loops — The control theory behind the compound loop
- The Value Shift — When knowledge becomes commodity, value moves to flow
- Unixification — Standards that make DePIN composable
The signals are already in the air. The mycelium is already growing. The only question is whether you're part of the network or just walking through it.
What invisible infrastructure are you depending on that you don't own?