DePIN Track 2026: From GPU Computing Power to Wireless Networks, Reconstructing Real-World On-Chain Infrastructure

DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks) has passed the critical stage from concept validation to actual revenue generation in 2026. According to DePINscan tracking data, the entire track currently covers 423 active projects, with a total device count surpassing 41.8 million units. The industry’s total market value is approximately between $9.4 billion and $19.2 billion (depending on statistical methodology), marking the first time it has exceeded the oracle track. These figures are not purely driven by speculation—In January 2026, just seven major DePIN projects (Helium, Render, Hivemapper, UpRock, NATIX, XNET, Geodnet) had a combined on-chain monthly revenue of $2.6 million, mainly from paid services such as storage transactions, computation tasks, data points, and mapping services, setting a new record.

Against the backdrop of exponential growth in computational power demand for AI large model training, projects focusing on computing and infrastructure services within the DePIN track are undergoing dual restructuring on both supply and demand sides. This article selects four representative projects—Render Network (decentralized GPU computing), Filecoin (decentralized storage), IoTeX (modular DePIN infrastructure), and Helium (decentralized wireless network)—to analyze from the perspectives of industry landscape, core data, governance dynamics, and capital flows.

Industry Status: From Scale Expansion to Structural Differentiation

Compared to the estimated long-term market opportunity of over $2 trillion to $3 trillion, the DePIN track is still in its early spring. Looking at the distribution of underlying blockchain infrastructure, Solana hosts over 50 major DePIN projects, with a combined market value of about $3.2 billion to $3.5 billion, accounting for approximately 17% to 40% of the DePIN sector (depending on statistical approach). Solana’s high throughput and low latency features suit DePIN projects that handle massive amounts of real-time device data, but this centralization also raises structural discussions about “decentralized infrastructure built on a single chain.”

In terms of on-chain revenue structure, storage transactions and computation tasks are currently the two main sources of income in the DePIN sector, followed by mapping services and data points. This indicates that DePIN projects capable of directly serving AI and data processing needs are gaining stronger willingness to pay validation.

Regarding token prices, according to Gate data, as of May 6, 2026, Render Network (RENDER) is priced at $1.90, with a 24-hour trading volume of $576,910, a market cap of approximately $983.9 million, and an increase of about 3.94% in the past 24 hours. It should be noted that token prices are influenced by multiple macro and micro factors; the following analysis focuses on project fundamentals and technological evolution, not on price trend predictions.

Render Network: A Key Leap from Rendering Network to General Computing Layer

From April 16 to 17, 2026, RenderCon 2026 was held at Nya Studios in Hollywood. One of the core agendas was the final discussion and community voting on governance proposal RNP-023. The proposal was approved by the community and plans to integrate Salad Network as a dedicated subnet, adding about 60k consumer-grade GPUs to Render Network, while simultaneously optimizing the RENDER token burn mechanism. Additionally, the official version of Render’s flagship rendering software Octane 2026, launched in early 2026, marks the strategic expansion from pure visual rendering to AI inference computing entering the execution phase.

Network Structure and Economic Mechanism

Render Network is a decentralized GPU computing marketplace led by Jules Urbach, founder of OTOY, connecting creators needing GPU power with AI developers and node operators with idle GPUs. To date, the network has processed over 71 million frames, with more than 5,600 active GPU nodes, ranging from consumer RTX hardware to enterprise data center GPUs.

Render’s token economy adopts a “burn-and-mint equilibrium” (BME) mechanism: task publishers pay RENDER tokens that are permanently burned, while node operators providing computing power are rewarded with newly minted RENDER tokens. This design links token supply directly to network usage—more usage results in more burning.

In the first nine months of 2025, the network burned a total of 530,171 RENDER tokens, a 278.9% increase compared to the same period in 2024 (139,924 tokens). By December 2025, total burned tokens exceeded 1 million RENDER.

The Supply-Demand Logic of RNP-023

Supply side: The current 5,600 GPU nodes are showing bottlenecks when handling large AI inference tasks and cinematic rendering peaks. RNP-023 aims to integrate about 60,000 active machines from Salad, creating a non-continuous leap in the network’s theoretical computing capacity.

Demand side: The Salad Network integration is not only hardware expansion but also crucially involves its payment process being directly incorporated into the BME burn channel. This integration is designed to achieve “burn volume exceeding mint volume” from day one. If successful, the monthly burn could reach 200k to 300k RENDER tokens by the end of 2026.

Industry Background and Competitive Landscape

Data shows that AI computing power roughly doubles every seven months. Render’s decentralized GPU pricing is about $0.69 per hour, and using an NVIDIA H100 in the DePIN market costs only about 1/18 to 1/30 of AWS.

Render is shifting from 3D rendering to general AI computing infrastructure via the Dispersed platform, essentially competing for the spillover benefits of AI compute. The sustainability of this narrative depends on whether decentralized GPUs can continue to match centralized solutions in actual AI training performance. Currently, with clusters mainly composed of consumer and mid-tier enterprise hardware, their competitiveness in high-precision large model training remains to be validated.

Filecoin: From Storage King to AI Computing Infrastructure

On March 26, 2026, Filecoin launched Onchain Cloud on the mainnet, a programmable storage and payment layer service aimed at AI agents and autonomous systems. At launch, 49.41 TiB of data was stored across 478 active datasets, with 81 payment wallets connected via on-chain payment channels.

From Storage Proofs to Demand-Driven Transformation

Filecoin is undergoing a strategic shift in 2026 from “storage capacity accumulation” to “demand-driven paid usage.”

• Storage utilization has risen from single digits two years ago to 36%, even as total committed capacity declines, the proportion of high-value data continues to increase.
• Over 925 clients store more than 1,000 TB of data on Filecoin, including Smithsonian Institution, MIT Open Learning, Internet Archive, Flickr Foundation, etc.
• FIL+ plans have attracted high-value data such as genomics and satellite imagery.
• Technologically, the Fast Finality (F3) protocol launched on April 29, 2025, has increased transaction settlement speed by 100 times, bridging the performance gap with centralized cloud services.

The core narrative shift for Filecoin is from “decentralized storage” to “AI data infrastructure.” The Onchain Cloud allows data to be used for AI model training without leaving the Filecoin network (Compute-over-Data mode), alleviating bandwidth bottlenecks in large AI dataset migrations.

Currently, the total network computing power is at a historic low (~17 EiB), as some early miners exit due to profit structure adjustments, leading to short-term FIL token inflows. After the last batch of tokens’ lock-up period ends at the end of 2026, supply pressure may ease, but this still depends on whether the network can generate sufficient paid demand growth beforehand.

IoTeX: Modular Infrastructure Base for DePIN

In 2026, IoTeX released the IoTeX 2.0 white paper, officially initiating a strategic upgrade from Layer 1 blockchain to a “DePIN modular open platform.” By modularizing functions such as off-chain computation verification, hardware identity recognition (ioID), and trusted security pools (MSP), IoTeX provides a flexible infrastructure toolkit for DePIN projects.

Industry Significance of Modular Strategy

Under this modular architecture, DePIN project teams do not need to build blockchain infrastructure from scratch but can call upon modules for device identity registration, off-chain computation verification, and trusted data transmission as needed. IoTeX 2.0 also supports building DePIN Layer 2 networks, enabling projects to inherit IoTeX’s security while customizing consensus and economic models.

On the economic model level, IoTeX 2.0 introduces a token burn mechanism similar to EIP-1559, along with a redesign of staking inflation. With the addition of MSP re-staking, the ecosystem’s annualized basic yield (APR) could reach about 20%.

Whether IoTeX’s modular path can truly become the “public chain infrastructure layer” of the DePIN sector depends on the quantity and quality of ecosystem projects. Its open platform strategy has gained support from institutions like Escape Velocity, 1kx, Pantera Capital, Filecoin, and Helium, but large-scale project migration and deployment have yet to occur, and value validation will take time.

Helium: Scale Verification of Decentralized Wireless Networks

As of early 2026, Helium has deployed over 1 million hotspots across more than 77,000 cities worldwide, serving about 3.5 million mobile connections daily, supporting real carrier-grade traffic through decentralized infrastructure. Data since June 2025 shows the network transmits an average of 70 TB to 80 TB daily.

Revenue Model and Coverage Verification

Helium completed its transition from “speculative mining” to “verifiable coverage” in 2026. The reward mechanism was recalibrated so that only hotspots in areas with actual data demand and high-quality coverage receive the highest rewards. Helium’s “hybrid mobile network operator” model complements traditional telecom operators: when users connect to community-operated hotspots, operators pay data offloading fees, distributed as tokens to hardware owners.

Currently, over 2,500 active Helium 5G hotspots cover 889 U.S. cities. In terms of token economics, hotspot owners earn about 70% of mining rewards by providing network coverage and data transmission, with the rest allocated to the network treasury and validators. The total supply cap of HNT is 223 million, halving every two years, with the most recent halving in 2025.

Industry Impact

Helium is one of the few projects in the DePIN track that has validated a “real paid user” model. Its value validation hinges not only on the number of hotspot devices but also on the network’s ability to continuously attract carrier-grade data offloading demand. As 5G coverage expands, whether Helium’s decentralized wireless network can replicate the “hybrid operator” model in more cities will directly influence its long-term positioning in DePIN.

Capital Signal: Haun Ventures’ $1 Billion Dual Bet

On May 4, the well-known crypto venture firm Haun Ventures announced the closing of a new $1 billion fund, with $500 million allocated to early-stage investments and $500 million for later-stage investments, to be deployed over the next two to three years. Unlike its previous focus solely on crypto infrastructure, this round explicitly includes AI agents as a core investment category, expanding the investment logic to “crypto financial infrastructure, asset tokenization, and AI agents.”

This strategic layout sends an important signal to the DePIN sector. Haun Ventures’ investment logic essentially bets on “supporting infrastructure layers”—the foundational layers that underpin the next wave of applications. Projects focusing on GPU computing, storage, and communication in DePIN are precisely the infrastructure providers needed for the AI agent economy.

This aligns closely with the long-term narrative of DePIN: AI agents require decentralized identity and payment rails, and blockchain networks can provide complementary value in AI-driven automation and efficiency. Projects within DePIN that can directly serve AI agent workflows may benefit earliest from this capital trend.

Sector Outlook: How AI and DePIN Fusion Will Reshape Industry Landscape

Synthesizing the project dynamics and capital flows above, the evolution of the DePIN sector in 2026 can be projected along the following dimensions:

Democratization of computing power driving cost restructuring: Decentralized GPU markets (represented by Render) with some GPU models costing only a fraction of traditional cloud providers’ costs are gradually eroding centralized cloud market share. The sustainability of this trend depends on whether distributed GPU networks can continue to optimize performance in high-end AI training tasks.

Blurring boundaries between storage and computation: Filecoin’s Onchain Cloud and Render’s Dispersed platform indicate that DePIN projects are evolving from single-service providers to comprehensive infrastructure platforms. When data storage and computation are completed within the same network loop, traditional “data transfer” costs will be significantly reduced.

Modularization lowering industry entry barriers: IoTeX 2.0’s modular architecture offers pre-made components from hardware identity to economic models, potentially sparking a new wave of DePIN startups. However, whether modular architecture can generate enough network effects to surpass integrated solutions remains to be seen.

Wireless networks’ scale verification has been preliminarily completed: Helium’s deployment of over a million hotspots and nearly 20k daily mobile connections demonstrate the feasibility of decentralized wireless networks in dense urban environments. The next challenge is to replicate this model across more cities.

Conclusion

The DePIN sector in 2026 exhibits a structural characteristic: the divergence between capital enthusiasm and project fundamentals is intensifying. On one hand, top-tier VCs like Haun Ventures leading a $1 billion investment, along with a16z Crypto’s recent announcement of a $2.2 billion fund, show strong confidence in crypto and AI infrastructure; on the other hand, project progress and value validation vary significantly, with investors shifting focus from device deployment numbers to on-chain revenue, paying user metrics, and token deflation effects.

The expansion of Render’s 60,000 GPUs and Haun Ventures’ strategic bet outline the current evolution of DePIN: from a vision-driven white paper era to a stage grounded in real physical infrastructure and verifiable economic models.

For observers of this sector, the key indicators in the second half of 2026 are already clear: the execution efficiency of RNP-023, the conversion rate of AI storage clients on Filecoin, the number of ecosystem projects deployed on IoTeX 2.0, and Helium’s cross-city expansion capability will be the core metrics to determine whether DePIN is truly entering a large-scale adoption cycle.