This month, Solana's DePIN ecosystem welcomes two new major players. The shared WiFi-based ROAM launched on March 6 on mainstream exchanges like Bybit and Kucoin, reaching the fourth position in the DePIN sector in terms of node count, with hardware devices achieving the top rank across the network. Austin Federa, former strategic director of the Solana Foundation, leads a funding round of $28 million with Solana co-founders and top VCs like Dragonfly and Multicoin to launch the distributed bandwidth project DoubleZero, aimed at creating a communication highway for web3 based on web2 infrastructure, which is expected to fundamentally address the network latency issues currently faced by web3.
Additionally, we observe that as of March 14, 2025, the Solana-based DePIN ecosystem has significantly developed, with a market capitalization exceeding $25 billion and approximately 78 DePIN projects covering various subfields such as wireless communication (e.g., Helium), computing resources (e.g., Render Network), geolocation (e.g., Hivemapper), and cloud storage (e.g., GenesysGo SHDWDrive).
Solana is becoming the preferred platform for DePIN projects due to its high throughput, low transaction costs, mature developer ecosystem, and a large user base. We see a DePIN empire ecosystem quietly emerging from Solana.
1. Analysis of Important Projects in the DePIN Sector
1. DoubleZero — The Highway for Web3 Built on Solana
On March 10, amidst a sluggish overall crypto market, another dark horse DePIN project, DoubleZero Foundation, secured a massive investment of $28 million from top VCs.
What exactly is DoubleZero Foundation, and how was it able to secure such a significant investment in a sluggish market?
I summarize the core points as follows:
(1) The founding team has rich experience in blockchain projects and has achieved success. Additionally, the founders have many resources in the industry and possess luxurious ecological resources.
Austin Federa, the founder of DoubleZero, was previously the Head of Strategy at the Solana Foundation and can be considered one of the key drivers behind the early rise of the Solana ecosystem. During his time at the Solana Foundation, he was responsible for global market strategy and directly participated in several key projects, such as promoting the integration of USDC and USDT on Solana, and even deeply involved in ecosystem collaborations during the FTX era.
At the same time, Austin Federa has a close relationship with the Solana core team (including Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal), which allowed DoubleZero to gain resource support and market recognition from the Solana ecosystem early on.
(2) The investment team is luxurious, with Solana founders jointly investing, clearly supporting Solana's DePIN strategic layout.
The image below shows the investor team of DoubleZero. If you are familiar with the investment landscape in the crypto space, you will know the significant influence of Dragonfly and Multicoin. They are not only long-term supporters of the Solana ecosystem but have also played important roles in several key projects (e.g., Multicoin's early bet on Solana, Dragonfly's participation in Serum).
In addition to top VCs, the funding power within the Solana ecosystem also played a core role in this round of financing, with Solana Ventures and Solana Labs co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal participating as angel investors.
From a somewhat irrational perspective, this is almost equivalent to announcing to others, "This is my beloved child."
It is worth noting that the investment in DoubleZero came right after the Solana Foundation announced its DePIN ecosystem strategy, making it the first project to receive clear investment.
Therefore, we believe that the Solana official's direct support indicates that Austin is not acting alone but is bringing the entire Solana resource pool into play, representing a comprehensive tilt of funds, technology, and market resources. For the entire DePIN sector, this is undoubtedly an important signal: the Solana ecosystem is actively laying out physical infrastructure networks, and DoubleZero may be the "vanguard" leading the charge.
(3) Leading technical solutions, building a highway for the web3 sector, allowing web3 projects to operate as smoothly as web2;
We know that the Web3 sector currently faces many issues, particularly at the infrastructure level. Due to limitations in public internet bandwidth and non-deterministic routing, Web3 projects often cannot operate as smoothly as Web2. Even if the issues of public bandwidth limitations and non-deterministic routing are resolved, if the latency issues between validators cannot be addressed, Web3 projects will still not be as smooth as Web2.
DoubleZero was created to solve these infrastructure-level problems in web3.
From the architecture shown in the image, we can see DoubleZero's unique Two-Ring Architecture. The Outer Ring connects to the public internet, using hardware (such as FPGA) for attack protection, signature verification, and transaction filtering, while the Inner Ring processes the filtered traffic through dedicated bandwidth lines and builds consensus.
First, the Outer Ring connects to the public internet, using hardware (such as FPGA) for attack protection, signature verification, and transaction filtering;
The benefit of this is that by pre-filtering incoming junk and duplicate transactions through dedicated hardware, it can reduce the burden on validators, allowing the blockchain to share filtering resources without requiring each validator to provide them individually.
Secondly, the Inner Ring processes the filtered traffic through dedicated bandwidth lines and builds consensus. It can improve communication efficiency through clear message routing, tracking, and priority management.
In terms of specific technical processing flows, the official disclosed information states:
(1) The Outer Ring serves as the first line of defense, primarily responsible for filtering out junk transactions, DDoS attacks, and invalid traffic from malicious contract calls. It uses an adaptive traffic filtering mechanism, leveraging machine learning and heuristic rules to analyze transaction patterns in real-time, accurately identifying and intercepting malicious traffic, ensuring that only valid transactions can enter the blockchain mainnet.
At the same time, the Outer Ring relies on decentralized zero-permission fiber contributions from independent contributors in the network to provide physical infrastructure, further ensuring the authenticity and priority of data packets. All transactions must undergo basic validity screening by the Outer Ring before entering the Inner Ring, reducing invalid transactions from entering the core network and enhancing overall processing efficiency.
(2) Transactions entering the Inner Ring have undergone strict screening, allowing it to focus on efficient transaction processing. The Inner Ring adopts a high-performance architecture similar to Solana, supporting ultra-high TPS (transactions per second) and ensuring extremely short transaction confirmation times to meet the demand for a large number of transactions.
To further enhance network smoothness, DoubleZero also employs a stateless validation model, which, compared to the traditional blockchain state storage model, allows the entire network to operate more smoothly and efficiently.
2. Roam — The Web3 Version of Starlink Built on Solana
On March 6, another decentralized wireless network project based on the Solana public chain, Roam, launched on Kucoin and Bybit, with a circulating market value exceeding $60 million, adding another strong player to the DePIN sector.
(1) What is Roam?
ROAM is a decentralized wireless network project based on the Solana blockchain, aiming to provide seamless, secure WiFi and eSIM connectivity globally, with the goal of building an open wireless network worldwide. It utilizes blockchain technology to achieve automatic network switching and secure connections, supporting individuals, smart devices, and AI agents.
Currently, it has over 2.3 million users and 2 million WiFi nodes, covering more than 190 countries, ranking high in the DePIN field.
The token $ROAM has a total supply of 1 billion, with 600 million allocated for mining and community activities, allowing users to earn tokens by providing WiFi or validating the network.
According to Messari's 2024 report, ROAM ranks fourth among DePIN projects with over 1 million active nodes and ranks first in terms of hardware node count. Competitors include Helium and DIMO, but ROAM's global coverage and user scale provide it with an advantage.
If Elon Musk's Starlink has built a communication system based on outer space, I would like to call Roam the web3 version of the Starlink system based on terrestrial communication networks.
(2) Technical Advantages
ROAM utilizes OpenRoaming™ WiFi and eSIM technology, allowing users to access WiFi or share network performance data while ensuring that users do not face data leakage risks during WiFi sharing and usage through decentralized identity (DID) and verifiable credentials (VC), ensuring privacy and security.
The specific technical architecture and functions are as follows:
OpenRoaming™ Wi-Fi: Adheres to the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) standards, supporting seamless switching between different WiFi networks to ensure continuous connectivity.
eSIM Services: Provides smart eSIM services in over 160 countries, allowing users to access data networks without traditional SIM cards.
Blockchain Incentive Mechanism: Utilizes a Proof-of-Service mining algorithm, enabling users to earn ROAM tokens by providing WiFi services or validating network performance.
Decentralized Identity (DID) and Verifiable Credentials (VC): Uses blockchain technology to protect user privacy, eliminating reliance on centralized validators, enhancing security and decentralization.
In this system design, OpenRoaming™ Wi-Fi addresses the link protocol issues of communication systems across different countries and regions, while eSIM resolves the lack of SIM services in many areas, helping to create communication conditions in impoverished regions. The DID and VC technologies tackle data security and privacy issues during communication, introducing a web3 economic system that can quickly stimulate early network construction challenges.
The rapid growth of ROAM since its rebranding in 2024, making it a leading player in the DePIN sector, is not only due to the siphoning effect of the Solana ecosystem but also its own technological and sectoral accumulation.
(3) Operational Advantages
The project team has been deeply involved in the web3 sector for many years, well-versed in web3 project strategies. Through web3's passive income and sharing incentive models, they have quickly accumulated network effects and initial users.
ROAM encourages users to participate in network construction through a mobile application, such as adding WiFi nodes, daily check-ins, or inviting friends to earn Roam Points, which can be exchanged for ROAM tokens after the token generation event (TGE).
A deeper dive into the project team's background reveals that although the ROAM project officially started on April 2, 2024, it was previously known as MetaBlox. We found that MetaBlox was originally established in 2018 but did not gain traction until it rebranded to ROAM and migrated to the Solana mainnet in 2024. This indicates that the success of any project is the result of years of dedication to the sector, so even during the current market downturn, we believe that good projects can still transcend time cycles and bloom like roses.
In summary, ROAM offers an excellent wireless network sharing project and has already formed a strong network effect. Currently, its circulating market value is only around $15 million, which is far less than Grass's $360 million. If we can see more users participating in the ROAM network, we may witness the project's rise and flight in the next bull market.
2. Ecosystem Observation
As of March 14, 2025, we observe that the Solana-based DePIN ecosystem has significantly developed, with a market capitalization exceeding $25 billion, far surpassing the scale of DePIN projects in other ecosystems. We are witnessing a DePIN empire ecosystem being nurtured on Solana.
According to public data, there are approximately 78 DePIN projects on Solana (data referenced from platforms like Messari and DePIN Scan as of 2024), covering various subfields such as wireless communication (e.g., Helium), computing resources (e.g., Render Network), geolocation (e.g., Hivemapper), and cloud storage (e.g., GenesysGo SHDWDrive). Solana's high throughput (theoretically up to 50,000 TPS), low transaction costs (approximately $0.00025 per transaction), and mature developer ecosystem make it the preferred platform for DePIN projects.
Current representative DePIN projects on Solana include:
Helium: The world's largest decentralized wireless network, which has deployed nearly 1 million hotspots covering 192 countries and providing IoT and 5G services after migrating to Solana.
Render Network: A decentralized GPU computing platform that migrated from Ethereum to Solana, having processed tens of millions of frames of image data, supporting AI and media rendering.
Hivemapper: A decentralized digital mapping network that challenges Google Maps through user-contributed dashcam data, covering multiple cities.
GenesysGo SHDWDrive: A decentralized cloud storage solution attempting to fill the storage gap in the Solana ecosystem.
Dabba Network (emerging project): Focuses on the Indian broadband market, enhancing network coverage through decentralization.
The total market capitalization of Solana's DePIN projects reached approximately $25.6 billion in June 2024 (DePIN Scan data), and it may fluctuate in 2025 due to market volatility and project growth. Leading projects like Helium, Render, and Hivemapper have fully diluted valuations (FDV) exceeding $10 billion.
Summary of Solana's DePIN ecosystem compared to other public chains
From the table above, it is evident that Solana has a significant advantage in the DePIN sector compared to other public chains:
In terms of technical performance and cost advantages, Solana's high performance and low cost, particularly its low gas fees, are especially friendly to DePIN projects (such as micro-payment incentives) that require frequent transactions compared to Ethereum and other public chains.
The Proof of History (PoH) and parallel processing capabilities enable it to handle large amounts of real-time data for DePIN projects (such as IoT device communication and map data uploads), allowing DePIN projects to operate smoothly and comfortably like web2 projects.
In the public chain ecosystem, the Solana Foundation actively promotes the development of DePIN projects through funding and hackathons (such as collaborations with Multicoin Capital). Recently, a dedicated Solana DePIN fund was established to help Solana nurture more high-quality projects, with DoubleZero being the first and most well-known project.
Therefore, we optimistically believe that Solana is not merely a memecoin public chain; its current standing is not solely due to its MEME effect but rather its solid ecological foundation, technological advocacy, and strong support for the community and projects. We are optimistic that the next DePIN empire ecosystem may be born on Solana.
3. Recent Important Events in the DePIN Sector
1. On February 1, the DePIN and AI fully chain-compatible modular infrastructure IoTeX released its 2025 development roadmap, focusing on the DePIN + AI ecosystem:
- DePIN-enabled physical perception AI
IoTeX has launched an open-source framework called QuickSilver that combines large language models (LLMs) with DePIN network data to create high-level AI applications, planning to launch the QuickSilver testnet in the first quarter. Developers will be able to use QuickSilver to connect the existing DePIN world with the emerging AI world, creating a new wave of "perceptible AI applications."
- Establishing a DePIN + AI strategic reserve
IoTeX will create an initial BTC-based DePIN + AI asset strategic reserve for IOTX holders. This reserve will serve as a "vault" for long-term quality tokens and assets, safeguarding the interests of IOTX holders.
- Community First
A comprehensive community empowerment plan, combined with a DAO-based governance model, allows the community to directly participate in the development of IoTeX.
2. On March 3, during the ETHDenver 2025 event, a forward-looking dialogue on the regulatory framework for cryptocurrency and DePIN + AI was held at the DePIN + AI R3al World Summit, featuring Salah, Policy Director of the Blockchain Association, and Larry, Head of the IoTeX ecosystem. This sparked deep industry reflections on the integration of technology and policy direction.
Salah emphasized: "Current U.S. regulatory agencies are accelerating their exploration of how to incorporate innovative technologies like DePIN, which merge the physical and digital worlds, into the national strategic framework. Future regulatory frameworks must balance technological innovation with public interest, and the transparency of DePIN and the explainability of AI may become key to solving regulatory challenges."
Larry shared IoTeX's practical experience: "From compliance collaborations with Grayscale and Coinbase to co-chairing the Blockchain Association's DePIN working group, we have always centered on 'verifiable physical data' to align DePIN + AI with the demands of the real economy."
3. On March 6, the Solana Foundation and the Solana Chinese community Solar will hold a DePIN Day event in Shenzhen, the hardware capital, on March 8.
Emerging DePIN projects in the Solana ecosystem, including Cudis, Starpower, Geodnet, Roam, Aethir, Gradient, and DeGlass, will attend and share their experiences on-site.
4. Recent Industry Financing Events
1. On February 27, the Solana ecosystem DePIN project Shaga completed a $4 million seed round of financing, led by IOSG Ventures, with participation from Everyrealm, Amber Group, and several angel investors.
Shaga aims to reshape the gaming industry — breaking through hardware limitations to deliver ultra-low latency, making high-performance gaming accessible.
BlockBeats previously reported that on June 25, 2024, Shaga completed a $1 million angel round of financing, led by Arca, with participation from MARIN DIGITAL VENTURES, Skybridge20 Ventures, Aurory, Quotient Ventures, as well as angel investors including Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and Helium founder Amir Haleem.
2. On February 25, the DePIN project Geodnet completed an $8 million token financing, led by Multicoin.
Geodnet provides financial incentives to startups, encouraging ordinary people to host physical infrastructure. Due to strong demand for Geodnet's services, the project's token (its incentive mechanism) has more than doubled in the past 12 months.
In April of last year, the GEODNET Foundation announced it had completed over $2 million in strategic financing, with participation from CoinFund, Pantera Capital, VanEck, and Santiago R. Santos. The additional funds raised will support the foundation in achieving its short-term goals, including decentralization and developer usability.
3. On February 5, the DePIN gaming infrastructure platform Beamable completed a $13.5 million Series A financing, led by Bitkraft Ventures.
Beamable Network aims to change the way gaming backend infrastructure is built and operated.
4. The DoubleZero Foundation announced it has secured a $28 million investment led by Dragonfly and Multicoin Capital.
Double Zero is a project based on the DePIN sector that allows anyone to contribute independent fiber links without permission, essentially laying down an "information highway" for the Web3 world. The project's biggest highlight is its hardware-driven nature, directly targeting the infrastructure layer. DoubleZero's goal is simple: to increase bandwidth and reduce latency for all high-performance blockchains.
Special Statement: All articles from DePINone Labs are for informational and educational purposes only and do not constitute any investment advice.
This report is produced by DePINone Labs; for reprints, please contact us.
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