Exeos Network

An irreverent cohort of new DePIN entrepreneurs are ruffling feathers with a bold strategy: build revenue-generating businesses before launching tokens. While many will take to the streets to protest this vile repudiation of the status quo, just stick with me. Whereas DePIN 1.0 was defined primarily by token emissions, DePIN 2.0 will be defined by a return to real business fundamentals: product-market fit, unit economics, CAC, revenue, cash flows. That “DePIN tokens are down” is actually not a valid incrimination of anything. Alts are down and DePIN has lost the sexy bid. But this was always destined to happen. DePIN is actually the least sexy, and in the long run will be the most fundamentally priced sector. The most successful DePIN projects will feel unsexy because they’ll operate like infrastructure. They’ll deliver fundamental resources with the reliability of a utility. But, in time, some DePIN tokens will rise from the ashes. And those tokens belong to the platforms that are good businesses today and will become great businesses due to their surgical deployment of a token and even more surgical accrual of value to that token. I think DePIN 2.0 - The Business Generation - broadly looks like this: 1. Teams first figure out what works, and what doesn’t work before releasing the beast 2. They always generate substantial revenue before releasing the token 3. Rather than “order hardware and deploy anywhere”, incentivized build-out is a) phased b) tightly mapped against revenue scaling units (typically by geography) 4. The token’s purpose is simple and easy to understand for deployers, investors, and speculators 5. Token sinks are more abundant than token faucets 6. The primary token sink is revenue accrual 7. Emissions schedules are adaptive, not fixed from t=0 8. Apps are built without tokens, infrastructure to support the app is built with tokens Decentralization enables key properties that truly global systems require: censorship resistance, capital formation, and the ability to permisionlessly build applications on top. We’ve spent too much time navel gazing about complex token incentives models and pursuing “decentralization” as if it’s some holy principle. Nobody cares about decentralization in and of itself. What we need to care about is building generational companies, that grow every year, and generate a lot of cash.