Decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) have been deemed dead by many investors, but Messari and Escape Velocity’s new “State of DePIN 2025” report claims that the sector has steadily grown into a $10 billion market, generating $72 million in on-chain revenue in the last year alone.
According to the report, DePIN tokens in the “Class of 2018-2022” are down a significant 94%-99% from their all-time highs. However, major projects currently have verifiable recurring revenues and trade at 10x to 25x revenue multiples, which Messerli characterizes as undervalued relative to growth.
Messerli said this shift marks a shift from subsidy-driven growth to a network that generates revenue through actual use, particularly in areas such as bandwidth, computing, energy and sensor data.
Marcus Levin, co-founder of XYO, a data and DePIN founded in 2018, told Cointelegraph that revenue is more important than token price in the DePIN sector, and as the market matures, “valuations are starting to reflect real economic activity that can be sustained even when token prices are flat.”
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DePIN: From hype to profit
The authors contrast DePIN 2021 and DePIN 2025, stating that earlier cycles were dominated by pre-revenue networks with high token inflation, demand constraints, and retail speculative valuations.
In contrast, today’s leaders generate revenue on-chain, see little to no supply inflation, and see growth driven by utility and cost advantages rather than subsidies.
Levin said the DePIN sector is “fundamentally different” from the broader cryptocurrency industry because it provides “real-world utility to end users.”
Success, he said, “will first be seen in usage and cash flow, not speculative price action.”
Messari DePIN leaders
Messari’s DePIN Leaders Index highlights 15 projects across bandwidth, compute, energy, and sensor networks that meet certain criteria, including at least $500,000 in annual recurring revenue and at least $30 million in funding.
One of the report’s headline findings is that DePIN’s revenue growth has proven more resilient than decentralized finance (DeFi) and Layer 1 in the current bear market.
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The prices of DePIN tokens such as Helium (HNT) and GEODNET (GEOD) declined by 77% and 41% from December 2024 to December 2025, while on-chain revenues increased approximately 8x and 1.7x, respectively, over the same period, while the revenues of major DeFi protocols and smart contract chains declined significantly.
Levin said the “big divide” for the DePIN industry as a whole is “whether the network can generate revenue from real customers without always relying on incentives.”
He said DePIN is “not economically tied to a single market” and is starting to see repeated use cases in some areas, such as positioning, mapping and robotics, while others remain “more constrained by regulation and competitive pressures.”
InfraFi and DePIN’s new infrastructure deal
Last year was DePIN’s biggest fundraising year ever, 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 revenue from those assets.
USDai, Daylight, and Dawn are cited as early InfraFi examples in compute, energy, and bandwidth, with USDai growing to approximately $685 million in user deposits to fund its graphics processing unit fleet.
Messari argues that the best DePIN tokens currently resemble next-generation infrastructure businesses in terms of bandwidth, storage, computing, and sensing, but are trading at prices that have “little chance of survival, let alone success.”
Levin said the “most capital-intensive” networks are those that “can reliably serve enterprises and artificial intelligence-driven demand sectors.”
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