Decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePINs) have been written off as dead by many investors, but a new “State of DePIN 2025” report from Messari and Escape Velocity says the sector has steadily grown into a $10 billion market and generated $72 million in onchain revenue in the past year alone.
According to the report, DePIN tokens for the 2018-2022 class are down a whopping 94%-99% from their all-time highs. However, flagship projects now generate verifiable recurring revenue and trade at 10 to 25 times revenue multiples, levels that Massari describes as undervalued relative to growth.
Al-Masari said that this shift represents a shift from subsidy-based growth towards networks that generate revenue through real-world use, especially in areas such as bandwidth, computing, energy and sensor data.
Marcus Levin, co-founder of XYO, a data and DePIN company founded in 2018, told Cointelegraph that revenues matter more than token price in the DePIN sector and that as the market matures, “valuations are starting to reflect real economic activity that holds up even when token prices are flat.”
Related to: Solana-based Natix is bringing DePIN data to self-driving AI with Valeo
DePIN: From hype to revenue
The authors compare “DePIN 2021” and “DePIN 2025,” saying that early cycles were dominated by pre-revenue networks with high token inflation, demand constraints and valuations driven by retail speculation.
By contrast, today’s leaders generate revenue online, experience little or no supply inflation, and see growth driven by utility and cost benefits rather than subsidies.
Levin said the DePIN sector is “radically different” from the broader cryptocurrency industry because it provides “real benefit to end users.”
Success appears “first in utilization and cash flow, not in speculative price movement,” he said.
DePIN leaders in my path
Messari’s DePIN Leaders Index highlights 15 projects across bandwidth, computing, power and sensor networks that meet certain thresholds, such as at least $500,000 in annual recurring revenue, and at least $30 million.
One of the key findings of the report is that DePIN’s revenue growth has proven to be more resilient than decentralized finance (DeFi) and the top tier in the current bear market.
While the prices of DePIN tokens such as Helium (HNT) and GEODNET (GEOD) declined by 77% and 41% from December 2024 to December 2025, their on-chain revenues increased approximately eight times and 1.7 times, respectively, over the same period, versus the sharp decline in revenues of leading DeFi protocols and smart contract chains.
The “big difference” between DePIN’s segments is “whether the network can make money from real customers without constantly relying on incentives,” Levin said.
He said DePIN was “not economically tied to a single market,” and some areas, such as positioning, mapping and robotics, began to show recurring use cases while others remained “more constrained by regulation and competitive pressure.”
Emerging infrastructure trading for InfraFi and DePIN
Last year was an all-time high funding year for DePIN, with nearly $1 billion raised across the sector, up from $698 million in 2024 and well above previous cycles.
The report highlights “InfraFi” as an emerging DePIN/DeFi hybrid model where stablecoin holders fund real-world infrastructure and earn a return from those assets.
USDai, Daylight, and Dawn have been cited as early examples of InfraFi in compute, power, and bandwidth, with USDai growing to about $685 million in user deposits to fund fleets of GPUs.
The best DePIN tokens now resemble next-generation infrastructure companies in bandwidth, storage, compute and sensing, yet they trade at prices that “imply little chance of survival, let alone success,” Massari says.
The networks that will “benefit the most” are those that “can reliably serve AI-driven and enterprise demand segments,” Levin said.
