Is DePIN Entering Its Next Growth Phase?

Helium's carrier offload business is generating its highest daily revenue in over a year, though a sharp revenue drop from roughly 50,000 dollars to roughly 10,000 dollars per day starting around early June was caused by the removal of a subsidy rather than any decline in actual data transfer. The Helium team had been subsidizing data transfer at 50 cents per gigabyte, well above market rate, and governance changes pushed the floor to 10 cents per gigabyte, with the current rate floating near 12 cents. Actual transfer volumes have not changed dramatically, and network-level metrics beyond revenue have been trending upward for over a year. The majority of Helium traffic now comes from carrier offload partnerships with AT&T and T-Mobile rather than from Helium Mobile, which was driving only a small percentage of total network traffic and was more of a bootstrapping tool and cost center than a core asset.

Helium Mobile, which had approximately 700,000 total sign-ups but only tens of thousands of active paying subscribers, has been acquired by Noble Mobile, the carrier founded by former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, which will continue routing traffic over the Helium network. The Helium team had explored a daily buyback and burn mechanism using Helium Mobile revenue, which was generating approximately 1.5 million dollars per month as of May, but that pathway closed off in January 2026. Nick Carpignato's stated north star for Helium is reaching seven to ten times current daily traffic volumes, a threshold he believes would give the network meaningful leverage with carrier partners and begin compounding the flywheel. International expansion, particularly in Mexico and Brazil, is identified as a meaningful near-term growth catalyst, with economics in South America described as fundamentally different because Helium can create net new coverage rather than supplement existing infrastructure, supporting much higher rates.

HIP 149 is described as the most material change Helium token holders will face in the coming months and the most contentious community decision in the past six to twelve months. The proposal would mint approximately 141 million HNT over 36 months into a multi-sig controlled by Nova Labs and a community-elected advisory council with five community seats and two Nova Labs seats, giving the community a supermajority. HIP 149 would also retire proof of coverage rewards, which currently represent roughly 25 percent of HNT emissions, and reallocate those rewards to data transfer incentives. The near-to-medium-term market may need to digest the new HNT supply before longer-term growth benefits are realized.

Nick argued that the traditional DePIN bootstrapping model of front-loading emissions to build out a physical network has failed for most projects launched over the past two years and is effectively dead, with most of the market now disillusioned with that approach. He pointed to two networks called Daylight and Dawn as examples of a newer model where a protocol incentivizes participants to originate capital on-chain in a loan-like structure rather than distributing tokens upfront, requiring a native stablecoin, a yield-bearing version of that stablecoin, and a protocol rewards token. Daylight carries a structural risk specific to solar, where panels have a 15 to 25 year lifespan that could lock capital in a redemption queue for years, and it remains unclear whether capital holders would accept that risk for a few extra percentage points over market rate. Geonet was highlighted as a standout, having become the largest RTK network in the world by coverage and pricing, with unusually simple tokenomics relative to peers cited as a key factor, reinforcing a broader pattern in which more complex two-token and three-token structures have historically produced worse outcomes for holders.

Backpack emerged as the breakout tokenized equity platform on Solana after listing tokenized SpaceX equity that is redeemable into a brokerage account off-chain, with holders having an actual claim on the underlying equity and the ability to move assets between on-chain and off-chain. The SpaceX listing drove a large spike in tokenized equity volume on Solana, though Carlos cautioned that SpaceX was arguably the biggest IPO candidate in history and subsequent listings may not replicate that level of hype, potentially following a pattern similar to the Trump token where initial volumes anchor expectations that later listings fail to meet. The pre-stock variant of SpaceX was trading at a 33 percent discount to spot at the time of discussion, partly attributed to SPV structure carrying costs and a mandatory post-IPO lock-up with shares unlocking in tranches over the first six months. Anthropic raised concerns roughly one to two months before the recording about potentially not honoring some SPVs claiming investment in the company, adding further uncertainty for pre-stock holders.

OpenAI and Anthropic have filed confidential IPO paperwork and could go public before the end of summer or end of year, with equity issuance expected to set new records well beyond 2021 levels in total dollars raised. An OpenAI or Anthropic listing on tokenized equity venues was predicted to generate very high trading volume. xStocks on Solana has grown to slow-to-mid eight-figure daily trading volume in recent months, while Base tokenized equity volume has scaled to a few million dollars per day, with Coinbase having announced plans to bring tokenized equities onto Base.

FOMO raised 75 million dollars at a 550 million dollar valuation in a Series B, implying roughly 20 to 25 times sales on approximately 20 million dollars in annualized revenue.