DePIN's Imperfect Present & Promising Future: A Deep Dive - Compound Writing

The core user flow of Daylight is as follows:

• Homeowners can store excess energy produced by a DER; this is standard, as there’s typically enough in excess to produce revenues and sustain a home’s energy consumption


• In times of high demand, distribute this energy back to the grid


• VPP operators can aggregate these homes into pools and sell it back to a

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There’s certainly an argument that the more physical the network is, the more difficult it will be to reach escape velocity. The flipside is that those who do reach escape velocity will have much stronger moats compared to their virtual network counterparts. A common narrative is that software has zero marginal cost, but rarely do we talk about how... See more

But the most interesting teams in our view are those that either deeply understand where the demand-side is and how they can solve their problems in practice, or those who are building on a longer-term thesis toward something not widely appreciated today.

As with every type of network, there are two main areas of focus: the demand side and the supply side. Suffice it to say, the demand side is (almost) always the more difficult of the two to prove out. The simplest explanation for this is that the token incentive model maps easiest to the supply side. If you’re already driving a car or have some und... See more

At a high level, compute is just electricity transformed by a machine to perform a calculation . More precisely, it’s processing power, memory, networking, storage, and other resources required for the computational success of any program.

Filecoin functions as a peer-to-peer network for individuals to store and retrieve data across the internet. Traditional services that require sophisticated levels of data storage utilize either centralized systems or build it themselves. Filecoin’s goal is to fix this and offer bespoke or umbrella data services to everyone, anywhere in the world, ... See more

Disrupting traditional finance or improving global payment rails are two of the more widely accepted future use cases for crypto, while we argue there’s room for a third in DePIN.

There’s so much more design space to explore here, especially as adjacent technologies rapidly improve – better, cheaper, smaller and more efficient hardware is coming.

Crypto is not an established field like public equities so asking for a “ DePIN basket ” the same way you would look for exposure to Industrials or Consumer Staples is nonsensical. This is the equivalent of short-term narrative trading startup equity in our view.