There are tons of folks getting into DePin, and I’ve noticed some projects getting hundreds of thousands of users.
But not every project is on the up and up. Take Cordnode for instance. They got their contributors to claim rewards, then just disappeared. The contract they had for claiming was a total scam; you’d try to claim your tokens, but your wallet would still get drained with nothing to show for it.
Just like with any airdrop, it’s super important to make sure the DePin project you’re involved with is linked to a real company that’s actually got backing from reputable firms. A lot of Cordnode-like projects skip this crucial step.
And yeah, check out all the other signs of legitimacy too. Do you know of any other DePin projects that raise red flags? Share them here to help everyone out.
Most DePin projects will fail. Most business models are not sustainable at all and crypto projects have this tendency to rush to market and pray that the bull market will prevent a company bankruptcy. DePin was just another buzzword for meaningless tokenization of things with the aim of taking as much money away from retail. Because of that I think you can adjust your title to Most DePin projects are not legit.
DePIN isn't doomed, but the incentive design makes it easy to fake traction. If a network pays you for being there instead of for moving real traffic, you end up "mining empty air." The only DePINs that survive are the ones where external, paying demand (data, storage, compute, power) reliably exceeds token emissions and the operator's opex. Everything else is musical chairs with routers.
How I sanity-check them: who are the paying customers and can you see signed contracts or public usage dashboards; does usage burn the token or pay in fiat/USDC, and what's the burn-to-mint ratio over time; do device rewards scale with verified traffic, not hotspot count; how do they stop Sybils/GPS spoof/replay in "proof-of-coverage" (hardware attestation, RF audits, third-party beacons); what are per-unit economics (capex, backhaul, power) after rewards decay; and are they legal for spectrum/permits in the regions they claim. VC logos help exactly zero if those answers are bad.
DePIN hype has ended after grass did TGE. Every project that follow or try to replicate the success always such a flop and never see huge valuation.
Maybe because people know these are just gimmick project that don't really have any practical use in the real life, basically just exit for the team and their VC.
99% DePIN project are just waste of time.
Scammers follow what's trending and will likely gain support. There are still a few good DePin projects, but many are scams or useless. These scammers aim to capitalise on the hype surrounding the Grass token, so those interested in airdrops are cautious about accepting any DePin they stumble.
Like NFT and PVP, these DePin are a hype that will soon last. Many of these are just duplicate projects. Be aware of the warning signs if they ask you to send funds; thats one of the signs. Also, check if their extensions are safe to install on your machine to avoid getting your computer compromised.
It's not only about depins but generalizing all of the crypto projects because many are abusers there. And it's only going to matter when some people have already been affected and scammed by them. We have to be careful that even with airdorps, depins or whatever, there is no easy money in all of them. And these are going to trick you to becoming greedy because that's how they're taking many victims when they're fed with greed and false promises. So, lean only to the legitimate ones and avoid being involved into ugly projects that don't even have concrete background.
I think this does not only limited to DePin projects but are all over other projects, most of the altcoin we see today are somewhat filled with scam projects but the ability for us to know the right coin and project to invest on us what truly makes us an investor. Generally the cryptocurrency space aren't that friendly and with us and is filled with scam and we must be careful while selecting projects to invest in.
Maybe we can actually invest on those projects that are only trustworthy than just investing in a random project where we could be expecting a specific return as an investor.
Any depin without good backers must be tagged as a suspicious depin. Not all of depins were scam, but mostly they are. However, a depin that backed by a solid backers such as Open Ledger, and already doxxed would not scam us.
Anyway, there are tens or hundreds of depin at this moment, and 99% of them are scam. Why don't we think otherwise by making a list of good depin instead of making a report about tens or hundreds of scam depin? It'd be more helpful in order to make our time much efficient.
That's really wise. There will be hundreds of scam projects for each genuine project. We can really save time listing only the genuine projects here instead of digging all over for shady ones. There are quite a few which seem promising and worth giving a try. I was just surfing for various such depins and actually found a number of projects. It will take hours or maybe days for me to go through them to sort them accordingly.
Comparing these projects by their backer's past performance is a good idea but still a lot of these scam depins will list fake backers and it will again take days to validate with them to know if they are genuinely backing the project as not all backers are going to announce it on their socials.
Most people who participated in Grass for example were organized farmers. There were not any real measures against farming really other than needing to have different local IPs and I think they didn't allow VPNs. That is all. Both the participation and the claimed usage of the network were faked.
It is just an useless buzz thing like those tap games on telegram. One gets successful organically and then others want to repeat it artificially. Where are they now? Pretty much all of them are dead and irrelevant.
Of course, not all are legit. Is that something new?
The same as:
-Not all DeFi projects are legit
-Not all node test projects are legit
-Not all crypto P2Es are legit
-Not all TGE and airdrops are legit
But it doesn't mean these are all doom. At the right time, we can possibly hunt few more good and worth working with.
I have yet to find a good one with a real business case and demand in the real world. Usually what I am told is a good DePin project is because someone already invested in it or was farming it or read some influencer crap on Twitter. What good DePin projects are out there according to you? Name them.