For years many builders in the blockchain space worked to try to get recognition that onchain protocols that coordinated compute resources were: 1) Distinct from financialized digital asset protocols. They weren't trying to be money, nor were they trying to facilitate an alternative financial system. (Despite those being admirable and necessary goals.) 2) Able to be used to form open and independent infrastructures, that could serve as building blocks for preserving and ensuring and independent internet outside of the walled gardens of the big tech platforms. Initially some terms we used for these protocols were "work protocols", "resource allocation protocols", and even "web3" itself. We worked with many projects to form the @web3index to highlight the fees earned by some of these networks, and even collaborated on the @web3wg to educate the mainstream and regulators about these concepts. Eventually, the label DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks) emerged, coined by @Old_Samster at @MessariCrypto, and then was evangelized by firms that helped capitalize the space, such as @multicoin and others. This label became a popular catch all for both edge physical infrastructure coordination, such as wireless connectivity points and automobile censor networks, but also for datacenter based compute resources like storage and GPUs. Lately, I've been getting asked many questions from the media, around whether DePIN is now a played-out narrative, because it's been echoed through two cycles. Or what types of projects constitute "real DePIN's", versus ones that are just trying to latch on to the category? I would strongly recommend that people stop thinking about DePIN as "a narrative" or "a category", and instead put their thinking hats on and look at the purpose, merits, and distinction of each individual protocol and its accompanying incentive design. A network that is incentivizing the wide deployment of millions of wireless access points on specific hardware requires very different mechanisms than a network tapping into idle GPU resources to make available for AI inference on demand. If you value open an independent access to these types of resources, and believe that alternatives to a few big tech incumbent provided platforms will be good for accelerating fair and global innovation, then let's support, challenge, and build these projects and protocols...rather than worrying about whether the correct DePIN label is applied and whether the narratives are getting old. Lots of work to do - let's go! 💪