The Three Flows
What pattern governs how your phone call gets routed, how your payment settles, AND how your sensor reports its data?
The same one.
You send a text. You don't think about which tower carries it, which fiber it traverses, which protocol hands it off. You just send it. The network figures out the rest.
You tap your card. You don't think about which rail clears it, which currency converts, which ledger settles. You just pay. The network figures out the rest.
Your car reports its location. You don't think about which satellite triangulates, which edge node processes, which chain timestamps. It just happens. The network figures out the rest.
Three flows. Same architecture.
INTENT → ROUTE → INFRASTRUCTURE → SETTLE → FEEDBACK
| Flow | What Moves | Who Routes | Who Settles |
|---|---|---|---|
| Messages | Information | Telecom switches | CDR billing |
| Value | Money | Solvers, bridges | Blockchain |
| Data | Telemetry | Edge AI | Oracles |
This isn't metaphor. It's physics.
The Pattern
Every flow has the same components:
Intent. What you want to happen. Call this person. Pay this merchant. Report this reading. The system doesn't care about the how — only the what.
Routing. Finding the optimal path. Cost, speed, reliability, compliance. Someone (or something) evaluates options and picks the best route. In telecom, this is MEV before MEV had a name.
Infrastructure. The physical layer that carries the signal. Towers, cables, satellites. Rails, chains, bridges. Sensors, hotspots, nodes. Someone has to own and operate this.
Settlement. Proof it happened. The CDR that bills you. The on-chain receipt. The timestamped attestation. Without settlement, there's no trust.
Feedback. The loop that improves routing. This path was congested. This rail was expensive. This sensor was unreliable. Next time, route differently.
The pattern recurses at every scale. A single payment. A treasury operation. An entire financial system. Same architecture, different zoom level.
Devices as Economic Actors
Here's the shift most people miss:
In classic telco, the network delivered signaling and data. Your phone was a dumb endpoint on a dumb pipe.
In DePIN, that same device can:
- Prove work — coverage provided, energy generated, data captured
- Get paid — tokens for contribution, stablecoins for settlement
- Emit instructions — autonomously via smart contracts
Your base station becomes an agent. Your meter becomes an agent. Your EV charger becomes an agent. They invoice, settle, and respond to price signals in real time.
| Old Model | DePIN Model |
|---|---|
| Device reports usage | Device proves work |
| Telco bills monthly | Smart contract settles instantly |
| Fixed pricing | Dynamic price signals |
| Operator controls | Device responds autonomously |
A solar home mints tokens representing kWh produced. An EV charger sells excess capacity. A 5G small cell earns per-byte, paid in stablecoins, receiving config and QoS policies through the same substrate.
The device sends money AND instructions. Same message, same network.
Platform is Product
Steve Jobs understood. Elon Musk understood. The platform isn't what you build on — it IS the product.
DePIN takes this further:
| Traditional Platform | DePIN Platform |
|---|---|
| Gated, permissioned | Open, permissionless |
| Platform owner picks winners | Best instrument wins |
| Rent-seeking middlemen | Pure market competition |
| Lock-in by design | Fork if you disagree |
This is the ultimate free market. No gatekeepers. No approval processes. Deploy your instrument. If it's better, it wins. If it's not, it dies.
Darwin at the infrastructure layer.
The Coordination Layer
Why do Solana and Sui matter?
Not because they're fast chains for humans. Because they're coordination protocols for machines.
When your hotspot, your vehicle, your sensor are all economic actors, they need settlement infrastructure that runs at their speed, not yours. Machines coordinate at machine tempo.
The throughput isn't for your trades. It's for your devices talking to each other — everywhere, all the time, all at once.
Signal and coordination energy to and from the edges.
This is what DePIN enables. Not just "decentralized infrastructure" — that's the what. The why is coordination at scale, permissionlessly, with the best instrument winning every time.
How Telcos Play the Game
Telcos have two choices:
Option 1: Fight it. Treat DePIN as a crypto sideshow. Protect the capex model. Watch community-deployed infrastructure eat your margins from the edges.
Option 2: Ride it. Treat DePIN as wholesale infrastructure and settlement rails.
| What Changes | How Telcos Adapt |
|---|---|
| Community deploys marginal infra | Let the crowd build rural coverage, IoT, in-building cells — settle with them on-chain |
| Capacity clears on tokenized markets | Idle spectrum, bandwidth, edge compute bid/ask peer-to-peer |
| Automated settlements | Roaming and interconnect move from monthly CSVs to continuous on-chain settlement |
The mental model still applies: routing, QoS, pricing. The twist is that endpoints now own assets, publish telemetry, and get paid directly.
Evolve from pure connectivity into a coordination and treasury layer — APIs that expose identity, quality-of-service, and billing, with payments clearing over DePIN rails under the hood.
The Telco Trap
Here's what most people miss:
"The trillion-dollar companies will not be those that validate blocks."
Rails are crucial early, then commoditize. The pattern repeats:
| Era | Who Built Rails | Who Captured Value |
|---|---|---|
| Railroads | Train companies | Retailers, cities |
| Internet | ISPs | Google, Meta |
| Mobile | Telcos | Apple, Uber |
| Crypto | Blockchains | Wallets, agents, platforms |
Don't optimize to be the telco. Optimize to be the Uber.
The rails matter. But the value accrues to whoever owns the experience — whoever turns intent into outcome without the user thinking about the infrastructure.
The Convergence
Telecom engineers and crypto engineers keep discovering the same architecture because they're solving the same problem: move intent through constraint to settlement.
The constraints are different:
- Telecom: spectrum, physics, regulation
- Payments: compliance, liquidity, trust
- Data: bandwidth, latency, verification
The pattern is identical.
Once you see it, you can't unsee it. The same diagram — Thinker → Valve → Pipe — drawn fifty years ago on P&ID schematics, applies to AI agents executing smart contracts on blockchains recorded forever.
Intent expressed. Route optimized. Infrastructure carries. Settlement proves. Feedback improves.
What This Means
For builders: Stop building on platforms. Build instruments that compete on platforms. The best instrument wins. That's the whole game.
For investors: The value isn't in the rails. It's in the experience layer that turns intent into outcome. Don't bet on being the telco.
For operators: You can own the infrastructure you operate. The coordination protocols exist. The permissionless platforms exist. The question is whether you'll deploy.
The internet was supposed to be permissionless. Then platforms captured it.
DePIN is the second chance. Open infrastructure where the best instrument wins. Signal and coordination flowing to and from the edges — everywhere, all the time, all at once.
This time, you can own what you operate. Your device isn't an endpoint. It's an economic actor.
How will you add value to a platform that can't block a good idea?
Go Deeper
- DePIN Platform — The infrastructure layer
- Payment Rails — The convergence thesis for value
- Telecom Industry — The convergence thesis for messages
- Agents & Instruments — The P&ID pattern: Thinker → Valve → Pipe
- Phygital Beings — The actors in the system