DePIN is moving from narrative to measurable infrastructure: nodes are scaling, but 2026 will reward demand, revenue, and reliability.
Industry research frames DePIN as a category that could reach $3.5 trillion by 2028, and there are already 13+ million devices contributing daily across DePIN networks. At the same time, you’ll see write-ups claiming explosive growth in sector revenue and project count.
The bigger point is that DePIN is no longer just a story. These networks are already operating globally, and their services are increasingly relevant to real-world constraints, from balancing distributed energy and extending connectivity to providing compute capacity for AI workloads.
Below are six DePIN projects that are likely to shape physical infrastructure in 2026, selected for one simple reason: real deployment and tangible problems they’re solving right now.
1. Uplink: Wireless Connectivity Network
Traditional carriers can pour millions into towers and still lose the indoor battle. Then there’s the last mile: once you add backhaul and maintenance, rural coverage often stops making business sense.
Uplink offers an alternative approach: a DePIN-based connectivity marketplace that turns existing Wi-Fi and local networks into usable infrastructure. Instead of telecoms and enterprises building coverage from scratch, they can offload traffic onto real, already-deployed capacity.
For participants, the barrier to entry is low: there’s no need to purchase new hardware to get started. People can register compatible routers and locations and earn revenue for providing measurable, verifiable connectivity. Long term, any compatible Wi-Fi router could potentially become part of the network.
Uplink’s role is tracking contributions in a transparent dashboard and managing authentication, access control, payments, and quality of service across thousands of independent nodes.
What’s new is the scale. In its 2025 CEO Letter, Uplink says it surpassed 5M+ registered routers worldwide. Its dashboard also shows 15K verified routers that are live and actively contributing connectivity. In collaboration with a global Fortune 500 company, Uplink recorded a +23% increase in customers, an +82% rise in data transactions, and a +48% growth in connected devices over the year.
Uplink also raised $10M in April 2024, which helps explain how the project has been able to push from a growth narrative into a scaling phase.
In 2026, the focus shifts to the next level: how much of that network is validated for quality, activated by real traffic, and supported by paying customers.
Why Uplink could stand out in 2026 is simple: onboarding is easy. Uplink has highlighted OpenRoaming and says it was the first Wi-Fi DePIN project to earn both IDP and ADP certifications. Separately, it was also the first DePIN to launch on Avalanche.
OpenRoaming matters as well because, according to the Wireless Broadband Alliance, the federation has grown to 3M+ access points worldwide. In effect, it’s a massive 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, and enterprise/telecom clients. A token launch (TGE) should reinforce that shift from counting nodes to proving performance and revenue at scale.
2. Daylight: Energy Grid Coordinator
If you strip away the romance, the grid’s problem today isn’t simply “not enough energy.” Rooftop solar, home batteries, and EV chargers add capacity, but they also make the grid harder to predict and manage in real time.
That’s where Daylight stands out because it’s building a practical network that connects home energy devices (solar, batteries, EV chargers) so utilities can use their flexibility to balance the grid in real time. Homeowners share data and adjust usage when needed and get paid for the capacity and responsiveness they provide.
Importantly, Daylight is funded like a project aiming to scale beyond pilot talk. It raised a $9M Series A in July 2024 and later announced $75M in financing in October 2025, including $15M in equity and a $60M project development facility.
Daylight argues the biggest bottleneck in residential solar isn’t the hardware: it’s the go-to-market machine. In its own materials, the company claims over 60% of residential solar costs come from marketing and customer acquisition, and it positions a subscription and financing model as a way to cut that friction.
On revenue, Daylight describes two primary streams: monthly subscription payments from homeowners and market-based compensation earned by dispatching stored battery energy back to the grid during peak demand events (with proceeds shared with participants).
The company has also said it is currently funding subscriptions in Illinois and Massachusetts, a practical detail that signals it’s trying to make the model work in specific, regulated markets, not just in theory
3. DIMO: Vehicle Data for Owners
Valuable vehicle data remains locked in silos controlled by manufacturers.
DIMO enables vehicle owners to connect cars via device or app, generating data that developers access through APIs to build mobility applications. To date, the platform has connected 425K+ vehicles.
The real 2026 test is whether insurers and fleet operators will pay for the data and whether the platform can block fakes and deliver reliable, accurate telemetry at scale.
4. Filecoin: Decentralized Storage
Centralized storage runs on trust, which often turns into 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 being stored over time, not just promised on paper.
On the supply side, the network is frequently described as operating at a massive scale, often cited as over 1.5 exabytes of capacity with 3K+ storage providers.
In Q3 2025, Filecoin reported roughly 3.0 EiB of committed capacity (storage that providers have pledged and can cryptographically prove), and utilization rose to about 36%, up from roughly 32% the quarter before, a small but meaningful sign that demand is catching up.
Another demand-side signal: by the end of Q3, Filecoin counted 2K onboarded datasets, including 925 very large datasets (over 1,000 TiB each).
In economics, the network recorded about $792K in fees for the quarter, and an important nuance is that most of these were penalty-related, underscoring how strict reliability requirements are at this scale. In other words, Filecoin is increasingly less about “how much capacity exists” and more about whether providers can deliver storage as a dependable service.
The next phase for Filecoin hinges on execution: fast, reliable retrieval, deeper enterprise integrations, and uptake for workloads that matter, not only long-term backups.
5. io.net: Affordable AI GPUs
The AI boom is pushing demand for GPUs faster than traditional cloud supply can comfortably keep up, and that pressure shows up in both availability and cost. DePIN-style compute networks try to relieve that bottleneck by aggregating underused GPUs from many places: data centers, gaming rigs, and even former mining farms, then packaging them into a single marketplace developers can actually buy from.
That’s the pitch behind io.net. The project claims access to 30,000+ GPUs and markets itself as a lower-cost alternative to major cloud providers. One important nuance: while some third-party write-ups mention “up to 90% cheaper,” io.net’s own materials more commonly describe savings as “up to 70%” compared with providers like AWS, and that’s the safer number to repeat if you want to stay aligned with the project’s official messaging.
The real 2026 test is reliability. To compete with centralized clouds, io.net has to deliver GPU supply as a dependable service: meeting SLAs, keeping availability steady, satisfying compliance requirements for serious customers, and paying rewards only for verified compute actually delivered, not for idle hardware sitting on standby.
6. CureDAO: Health Data Infrastructure
Healthcare is the hardest sector for DePIN because it comes with strict regulation, high accountability, and zero tolerance for sloppy privacy. CureDAO is trying to turn health data into usable infrastructure: a unified health API and a plugin marketplace where incentives encourage clinics and patients to contribute data, while privacy is positioned as a built-in feature through cryptographic and operational safeguards.
CureDAO’s pitch leans on scale and measurable output. The project reports 10M+ donated data points from 10,000+ participants, largely focused on symptoms and factors that may influence them. The more important claim is what comes next: CureDAO says its citizen-science pipeline has produced roughly 90,000 studies, framing success not as “how many nodes exist” but as whether the data can generate real research work.
Still, in healthcare, raw volume isn’t enough. CureDAO’s success will depend on delivering verifiable research outcomes, maintaining privacy-by-design in practice (not just in messaging), meeting regulatory expectations, and, most critically, building partnerships with clinics and insurers who can validate that the data is medically useful.
What Comes Next for DePIN
Mass adoption has begun. Over the next 12–18 months, the focus shifts from node counts to business fundamentals: revenue, SLA performance, compliance, and seamless integration with legacy systems. The projects that win won’t be the loudest, but the ones solving real problems for real customers.
The question isn’t whether DePIN will reshape infrastructure. It’s whether the leading networks can maintain quality, navigate regulation, and generate economics that hold up at scale.
