New Direction for the DePIN Track: Integration with AI

The DePIN track has recently seen new developments, seeking to integrate with AI technology. A representative project of this trend is Roam, and we can understand the changes happening in the DePIN field by analyzing Roam.

The Essence of DePIN

DePIN is the abbreviation for Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network. Its core is to build infrastructure networks by incentivizing users to share personal resources through tokens, including areas such as storage space, communication bandwidth, cloud computing, and energy. The essence of DePIN is resource integration, efficiently directing resources to demand through incentive mechanisms.

The DePIN project is mainly divided into three categories:

1. Storage type: provides cloud storage services
2. Computing Power: Providing a decentralized GPU rendering platform
3. Network category: Forming a network by incentivizing users to purchase devices.

DePIN requires an initial investment to purchase physical equipment, followed by continuous mining, which differs from purely on-chain projects as it establishes a connection with the physical world, bringing positive externalities to the entire industry.

Current Status of the DePIN Market

According to data statistics, DePIN has nearly 4.56 million devices in approximately 196 countries or regions worldwide, with a market value of 7.1 billion dollars. Among them, Roam has the highest number of devices, totaling 1.18 million.

From a geographical distribution perspective, DePIN hardware devices are mainly concentrated in the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia. The concentration in Southeast Asia is particularly high, especially in South Korea. Overall, DePIN has brought about a new wave of wealth creation, and the Southeast Asia region is fully investing in this sector by leveraging its manufacturing and labor advantages.

Roam Project Introduction

Roam belongs to the network sub-segment of DePIN and is a combination of Web3 and WIFI, which can be referred to as a decentralized wireless network or decentralized telecommunications operator. Roam offers a variety of products, including WIFI hardware and eSIM cards. Users can mine by purchasing proprietary hardware or apply for eSIM cards and earn free data by completing tasks.

In the technical architecture of Roam, the Roam telecom data layer is a key concept that achieves functionality through four main ecological modules:

1. Roam Network: Focused on the construction of physical and digital infrastructure for networks
2. Roam Growth: Encourage users to participate in network construction through incentive mechanisms.
3. Roam Discovery: Supporting and incubating new projects or applications
4. Roam Community: Focused on community building and governance

The Combination of Roam and AI

Roam is deeply integrating with AI technology, leveraging its advantages in communication data to provide high-quality usable data for AI projects. In the field of AI, data is a critical bottleneck, especially communication data, which is currently mainly controlled by traditional telecommunications operators and is not open to the public.

Roam provides operator services through Web3 means, and in return, generates data as a data source for AI companies while protecting privacy. Roam uses decentralized identity (DID), verifiable credentials (VC), and zero-knowledge proof (ZK) technology to protect user privacy.

Roam is building a comprehensive data ecosystem by deeply collaborating with partners from various fields to integrate and provide multidimensional data resources, including weather monitoring, CDN services, renewable energy usage, authentication, payment behavior, and more. This diversified data integration capability provides unprecedented dimensions and depth of data for AI model training.

Ways for Ordinary Users to Participate in DePIN

The rapid development of Roam is mainly due to two strategies: free services and airdrops. Users can obtain free traffic by completing tasks, or they can earn points by sharing WIFI to participate in future airdrops. This low-threshold participation method allows ordinary users to have the opportunity to join the DePIN ecosystem.

Overall, the combination of DePIN and AI is building a decentralized infrastructure for the AI era, providing users with new participation opportunities and potential benefits.