TL;DR
- Messari and Escape Velocity peg DePIN at an overlooked $10B market that generated $72M in onchain revenue last year despite steep drawdowns.
- The report contrasts DePIN 2021 with DePIN 2025; utility and cost advantages replace subsidies as Markus Levin says valuations track real activity.
- A 15-project Leaders Index sets $500,000 ARR and $30M raised thresholds; Helium and GEODNET show revenue growth as funding hit about $1B and InfraFi gained traction.
Decentralized physical infrastructure networks, or DePIN, are back in focus after many investors declared the category dead, as real-world deployments mature. Messari and Escape Velocity argue the sector is quietly compounding into an overlooked $10B market with real usage. Their “State of DePIN 2025” analysis estimates DePIN produced $72M in onchain revenue last year, even as older tokens remain far below past peaks. The “class of 2018 to 2022” DePIN tokens are down 94% to 99% from all time highs, yet leading networks now show recurring revenue and trade around 10 to 25 times revenue.
From hype to cash flow: what’s changed in DePIN
In this framing, DePIN is moving from hype-era tokenomics to revenue-first network design across bandwidth, compute, energy, and sensor data. The key pivot is that growth is increasingly driven by utility and cost advantages rather than subsidies and inflation. The authors contrast “DePIN 2021,” dominated by pre-revenue networks with high token inflation and retail-led valuations, with “DePIN 2025,” where leaders generate onchain revenue and have little or no supply inflation. XYO co-founder Markus Levin says revenue matters more than token price and valuations are starting to reflect economic activity, even during bear markets.
Messari also built a DePIN Leaders Index that highlights 15 projects and applies business-style thresholds: at least $500,000 in annual recurring revenue and a minimum of $30M raised. The standout message is that DePIN revenues have been more resilient than DeFi and layer-1s in the current bear market. From December 2024 to December 2025, Helium’s HNT token fell 77% while its onchain revenue grew about 8 times, and GEODNET’s token dropped 41% as revenue rose roughly 1.7 times. Levin calls the “big divider” whether a network can earn money from real customers without leaning on incentives.
Capital flows add another datapoint: DePIN funding hit an all time high last year at about $1B, up from $698M in 2024, and some momentum is coalescing around “InfraFi.” InfraFi is positioned as a DePIN and DeFi hybrid where stablecoin holders finance infrastructure and earn yield from those assets. Examples cited include USDai, Daylight, and Dawn, with USDai growing to about $685M in user deposits to fund graphics-processing unit fleets. Messari argues the best DePIN tokens resemble next generation infrastructure businesses, and Levin says winners will be those that can reliably serve enterprise and AI-driven demand.
