The Integration of DePIN and AI: Unlocking a Trillion-Dollar New Market Blue Ocean

On February 18, a cutting-edge forum focusing on the integration of decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) and artificial intelligence (AI) was successfully held in Hong Kong. The event attracted over 800 registrations, with more than 250 industry leaders, technology developers, investors, and individuals interested in emerging technology trends present to discuss the immense potential and future opportunities brought by the combination of DePIN and AI.

DePIN+AI: Landscape, Current Situation, and Paradigm Shift

At the beginning of the event, the head of the Asia-Pacific region and the product manager jointly delivered a keynote speech titled "DePIN+AI: Landscape, Current Situation and Paradigm Shift". In recent years, artificial intelligence technology has experienced explosive growth, attracting a large amount of venture capital. According to analysis data, the investment in the AI sector has risen from $1 billion in 2010 to an estimated $78 billion by 2024. Data analysis shows that most investments are concentrated in Series A, indicating that capital favors AI startups and is willing to achieve excess returns through long-term companionship.

A particularly striking aspect of the speech was the forecast for the AI agent market. This market is expected to see significant growth over the next decade, increasing from $520 million in 2024 to $196.6 billion by 2034, with a compound annual growth rate of up to 43.8%. This growth is primarily driven by the profound impact of AI on the labor market in terms of cost reduction. As AI capabilities improve, production costs are shifting from labor to software. For example, when customer service demand increases to eight times its current level, the cost per interaction will drop to $0.125, potentially saving $54 billion in production costs.

In this transformation, AI has a huge demand for DePIN resources in four areas: computing power, bandwidth, energy, and data. Clues can be seen from the situations of several companies: a company's quarterly revenue in the computing power sector has increased fivefold over the past three years, the construction of data centers in North America in the bandwidth sector has also grown fivefold; the demand in the energy sector is enormous; in the data field, large companies invest over $500 million annually in purchasing wholesale data for training AI models.

The current status of the DePIN market is as follows: the market share in the wireless transmission field is 0.002%, in the computing field is 0.03%, in the energy field is 0.001%, and in the identity verification field is 0.2%. Although the number of DePIN projects has increased from 100 in 2022 to 1,170 in 2024, the market value has surged from $5 billion to $50 billion, and the active node rate has risen from 2% to over 50%, the overall share of DePIN only accounts for 0.1% of the trillion-dollar AI market, indicating that this sector has a growth potential of 100 to 1,000 times.

Highlights and Prospects

The event also detailed the DePIN+AI classic framework Quicksilver. This is an open-source integration framework that combines large language models (LLMs) with DePIN, supporting the integration of different DePIN projects through adapters and plugins, and providing the necessary tools and interfaces for training AI Agents. Quicksilver offers modules such as authentication, blockchain wallets, and verifiable computation, enabling AI Agents to perform various tasks such as data analysis, decision support, and automation using the data and resources provided by Quicksilver.

"modeling"

The first Physical AI "Bino AI" under the Quicksilver framework has been developed. Bino AI integrates the operating system with DePIN networks (such as weather stations, geographic sensor networks, and hardware devices), giving the AI Agent real-time perception and decision-making capabilities.

This event not only provided participants with a platform to gain in-depth understanding of the trends in the integration of DePIN and AI, but also showcased innovative applications and future development directions in this field through practical cases. Participants reached a consensus on the key role of DePIN in an AI resource-intensive future and expressed high concern for the strong potential demonstrated by the Quicksilver framework. With continuous technological advancement and gradual improvement of the policy environment, DePIN + AI is expected to become an important force driving the development of the global smart economy.