DePIN is moving from narrative to measurable infrastructure. Nodes are expanding and will see increased demand, revenue, and reliability in 2026.
Industry research has summarized DePIN as a category that could reach $3.5 trillion by 2028, with over 13 million devices already contributing to the DePIN network every day. At the same time, we also see articles claiming that the sector's revenues and number of projects have exploded.
More importantly, DePIN is no longer just a story. These networks are already in operation around the world, and their services are increasingly relevant to real-world constraints, from balancing distributed energy and extending connectivity to providing computing power for AI workloads.
Below are six DePIN projects that will shape physical infrastructure in 2026. These were chosen simply because of their real-world deployments and the specific problems they are currently solving.
1. Uplink: Wireless connection network
Traditional carriers can pour millions of dollars into towers and still lose the battle indoors. And then there's the final mile. Once you add backhaul and maintenance, rural coverage often no longer makes business sense.
Uplink offers an alternative approach: a DePIN-based connectivity marketplace that turns your existing Wi-Fi and local networks into usable infrastructure. Instead of building coverage from scratch, carriers and enterprises can offload traffic to actual capacity that is actually deployed.
There is a low barrier to entry for participants, and there is no need to purchase new hardware to get started. Users can register compatible routers and locations and earn money by providing measurable and verifiable connectivity. In the long run, a compatible Wi-Fi router may become part of your network.
Uplink's role is to track contributions with a transparent dashboard and manage authentication, access control, payments, and quality of service across thousands of independent nodes.
What's new is the scale. Uplink said in its 2025 CEO letter that the number of registered routers has exceeded 5 million worldwide. That dashboard also shows 15,000 verified routers that are live and actively contributing to connectivity. Working with global Fortune 500 companies, Uplink saw +23% growth in customers, +82% growth in data transactions, and +48% growth in connected devices over the year.
Uplink also raised $10 million in April 2024. This helps explain how the project was able to move from a growth story to an expansion phase.
In 2026, the focus moves to the next level. How much of that network is quality verified, activated with real traffic, and supported by paying customers?
The reason Uplink could stand out in 2026 is simple. Because onboarding is easy. Uplink highlights OpenRoaming and says it is the first Wi-Fi DePIN project to receive both IDP and ADP certification. Apart from this, it was also the first DePIN launched on Avalanche.
OpenRoaming is just as important, as the alliance has grown to more than 3 million access points worldwide, according to the Wireless Broadband Alliance. In reality, this is a large distribution surface that reduces onboarding friction and accelerates scaling through standardized roaming.
So 2026 is about execution, not hype. The metrics are clear: verified coverage, verified usage, enterprise/communications clients. Token launch (TGE) should enhance the transition from node counting to proving performance and revenue at scale.
2. Daylight: Energy Grid Coordinator
Stripping away the romance, the problem with today's power grids is much more than just “lack of energy.” Rooftop solar, home batteries, and EV chargers increase capacity, but they also make real-time prediction and management of the power grid difficult.
This is where Daylight stands out, building a practical network that connects home energy devices (solar power, batteries, EV chargers), giving utilities the flexibility to balance the grid in real time. Homeowners share their data, adjust usage as needed, and get rewarded for the capacity and responsiveness they provide.
Importantly, Daylight is being funded like a project that aims to scale beyond pilot talks. The company raised $9 million in Series A in July 2024, then announced $75 million in funding in October 2025, including $15 million in equity and $60 million in project development facilities.
Daylight argues that the biggest bottleneck for residential solar power is not the hardware, but the machinery that gets it to market. The company claims in its documentation that more than 60% of residential solar power costs come from marketing and customer acquisition, and positions subscription and financing models as a way to reduce that friction.
Daylight describes two main streams of revenue: monthly subscription payments from homeowners and market-based rewards for sending battery energy back to the grid during peak demand (revenues shared with participants).
The company also said it is currently funding subscriptions in Illinois and Massachusetts, a practical detail that shows it is trying to make the model work in certain regulated markets, not just in theory.
3. DIMO: Vehicle data for owners
Valuable vehicle data remains locked away in manufacturer-managed silos.
DIMO allows vehicle owners to connect their vehicles through a device or app and generate data that developers can access through APIs to build mobility applications. To date, the platform has connected over 425,000 vehicles.
The real test in 2026 will be whether insurers and fleet operators will pay for the data, and whether platforms can block counterfeits and provide reliable and accurate telemetry at scale.
4. Filecoin: Decentralized Storage
Centralized storage runs on trust, which often leads to vendor lock-in. Filecoin flips that model by making storage verifiable. Its Proof-of-Replication and Proof-of-Spacetime mechanisms are designed to prove that data is actually stored over time, not just as promised on paper.
On the supply side, networks are often described as operating at massive scale, often citing capacities in excess of 1.5 exabytes with over 3,000 storage providers.
In Q3 2025, Filecoin reported approximately 3.0EiB of committed capacity (provider-promised and cryptographically provable storage), with utilization rising to approximately 36% from approximately 32% in the previous quarter. This is a small but meaningful sign that demand is catching up.
Another demand-side signal: By the end of the third quarter, Filecoin counted 2,000 onboard datasets. It includes 925 very large datasets (over 1,000 TiB each).
On the economics side, the network recorded approximately $792,000 in fees during the quarter, but a key nuance was that most of it related to penalties, highlighting how demanding reliability requirements are at this scale. In other words, Filecoin is increasingly concerned with whether providers can offer storage as a reliable service, rather than how much space there is.
The next phase of Filecoin lies in execution. That means fast, reliable retrieval, deeper enterprise integration, and ingestion of critical workloads beyond long-term backup.
5. io.net: Affordable AI GPU
The AI boom is driving demand for GPUs faster than traditional cloud supply can adequately keep up, and that pressure is manifesting itself in both availability and cost. DePIN-style compute networks seek to alleviate that bottleneck by aggregating underutilized GPUs from many locations, such as data centers, gaming rigs, and even former mining farms, and packaging them into a single marketplace where developers can actually buy them.
That's the argument behind io.net. The project claims access to over 30,000 GPUs and markets itself as a low-cost alternative to major cloud providers. There is one important nuance. While some third-party articles state “up to 90% cheaper,” io.net's own documentation often expresses savings as “up to 70%” compared to providers like AWS, and it's safer to repeat this figure if you want to match the project's official message.
The real test in 2026 will be reliability. To compete with centralized clouds, io.net must provide GPU supply as a reliable service. Meet SLAs, maintain consistent availability, meet the compliance requirements of serious customers, and pay only for verified compute actually delivered, not for idle hardware sitting on standby.
6. CureDAO: Health Data Infrastructure
Healthcare is the most challenging sector for DePIN because it involves strict regulation, high accountability, and zero tolerance for sloppy privacy. CureDAO seeks to turn healthcare data into a consumable infrastructure: a unified healthcare API and plugin marketplace. Incentives encourage clinics and patients to provide data, while privacy is positioned as a built-in feature through encryption and operational safeguards.
CureDAO's pitch is based on scale and measurable outcomes. The project reports more than 10 million data points provided by more than 10,000 participants, focusing primarily on symptoms and possible influencing factors. The more important argument is what happens next. CureDAO says its citizen science pipeline has generated about 90,000 studies, and says success is not about “how many nodes there are,” but whether that data can produce real research results.
Still, raw quantities alone are not enough in the healthcare field. CureDAO's success will depend on its ability to provide verifiable research results, maintain privacy-by-design in practice (not just messaging), meet regulatory expectations, and most importantly, build partnerships with clinics and payers that can verify that the data is medically useful.
What comes next for DePIN?
Mass recruitment has begun. Over the next 12-18 months, the focus will shift from node counts to business fundamentals: revenue, SLA performance, compliance, and seamless integration with legacy systems. Successful projects aren't the loudest, but they're the ones that solve real problems for real customers.
The question is not whether DePIN will rebuild its infrastructure. What matters is whether leading networks can maintain quality, overcome regulation, and create economies of scale.
