The India DePIN Report
The gap between India’s digital capabilities and physical infrastructure is a trillion-dollar opportunity
🇮🇳 Welcome to India’s Infrastructure 2.0 Era.
In 2016, demonetization forced Indians to adopt digital payments practically overnight. In 2020, the pandemic pushed even the most traditional organizations to embrace remote work. These moments of disruption accelerated our digital transformation, but they also exposed the fragility of our physical infrastructure.
Two Indias exist simultaneously: one with lightning-fast digital payments, another with routine power cuts; one with world-class software developers, another where 87% lack reliable internet; one with billion-scale digital identity, another where breathing the polluted air kills 2 million annually.
Traditional infrastructure development follows familiar paths — government-led initiatives that scale based on political will and funding, or venture-backed startups constrained by immediate profit requirements. Both approaches have delivered incremental improvements, but neither has matched the transformative speed of India’s digital revolution.
At the recent Solana Summit, focused on DePIN and hardware in Bangalore, a new path emerged: infrastructure that scales outward rather than top-down or bottom-up.
In this model, each new participant strengthens the network. Taxi drivers become transportation entrepreneurs, delivery riders transform downtime into opportunities, homeowners become energy producers, and smartphones transform from consumption devices into infrastructure nodes.
This report showcases the boldest projects reshaping India’s landscape across energy, connectivity, mapping, climate, mobility, and digital microtasking — with insights straight from the visionaries, the founders, investors, and community members building this future and a deeper dive into what makes India the perfect testing ground for this new infrastructure revolution.
[📍 The report link is at the end of this page]
Solana Summit Bengaluru
The Bangalore Solana Summit exceeded all expectations, bringing together 600+ builders, investors, and enthusiasts. Across keynotes and demos, we witnessed a remarkable convergence of projects tackling India’s most pressing challenges.
Reimagining Energy Systems
Digital Energy Grid (DEG) took the spotlight as @SujithNairK presented their vision for creating an “internet moment” for energy.
The Digital Energy Grid (DEG) framework, developed collaboratively by the Foundation for Interoperability in the Digital Economy (FIDE) and the International Energy Agency (IEA), is built on the @BecknProtocol and creates a universal language for energy assets.
At its core, DEG works on three basic principles:
The Unified Energy Interface (UEI) has already processed 3 million transactions across 5,300 charging points in its first year.
GreenKWh showcased how decentralized storage can transform India’s energy landscape with plug-and-play battery solutions generating ~4 units daily, while their Telangana deployment pairs 50 solar systems with 2kW batteries for various applications.
DeCharge demonstrated how their community-owned charging network is making EV infrastructure profitable — their 7kW chargers, faster than Tesla’s home solution, achieve ROI in just 6 weeks for ordinary homeowners.
Sourceful Energy is building a decentralized virtual power plant connecting distributed energy resources (home solar, batteries, EV chargers) to a Solana-based system, with Energy Gateway hardware deployed in hundreds of homes across Europe, the US, and Asia for real-time reporting and grid coordination.
Connecting the Unconnected
Karam Lakshman from DabbaNetwork shared how they’re revolutionizing internet connectivity with their Dabba Lite hotspots, already deployed across 1,500+ locations with plans to scale to 100,000 devices post-TGE.
UpRock, with @jesseshappyhour at the helm, has built a mobile-first bandwidth sharing network approaching 3 million installs, recently partnering with DePIN Union to democratize real-time AI insights through decentralized web crawling.
Reimagining Climate Data
Abhinav from Breethr introduced their “AC of the future” delivering single-digit AQI readings indoors regardless of outdoor pollution, already installed for the Mumbai Indians cricket team and Jaslok Hospital.
AmbiosNetwork (formerly PlanetWatch) showcased their network of 8,000+ outdoor air sensors, now expanding to wildfire, pollen, and allergen detection after migrating to Solana.
Digital Microtasking & Beyond
The summit highlighted how smartphones are becoming infrastructure nodes through projects like:
AethirCloud is building a decentralized GPU computing network for AI applications and gaming, backed by roughly $150M in funding and recently launching their testnet.
WootzApp reimagines mobile browsing by letting users earn crypto for completing AI data tasks, with 1,000+ downloads and growing partnerships.
turns idle gaming PCs into a decentralized cloud gaming network with impressively low latency (under 20ms) across 1,800+ sessions.
NodeOps is making blockchain infrastructure accessible to everyone with one-click node deployment, managing 60,000+ nodes across 60+ networks with $3M+ in revenue.
GEODNET is building a decentralized GNSS (GPS) reference station network with 7,000+ active stations growing by 100–200 weekly, partnering with IoTeX to integrate identity and zero-knowledge proofs into their GEO-PULSE car-mounted sensors for verifiable location data.
@smiraldr and @0xChesterKing presented ionet’s decentralized cloud computing network addressing the GPU shortage crisis with a comprehensive suite of five products: Cloud, Worker, Explorer, Intelligence, and Staking — creating an accessible marketplace for distributed computing resources.
PipeNetwork is active in the Indian DePIN ecosystem, building a decentralized CDN on Solana with “guardian nodes” that slash delivery costs by up to 70% compared to traditional CDNs through a simple browser extension setup.
Staex provides a decentralized, zero-trust mesh network for secure machine-to-machine communication without centralized servers, partnering with @peaq to power the networking layer for DePIN projects with tools for device discovery and “anywhere to anywhere” communication.
Also, shout out to Proto, who have been building a decentralized mapping protocol where users passively map their surroundings, with delivery riders from Swiggy and Zomato earning crypto during their regular routes. Their community has mapped 75% of Google Maps’ coverage in Bangalore, including areas previously unmarked.
The Capital Perspective
A fireside chat with Amit Mehra from Borderless Capital and Harkirat revealed the investor perspective on DePIN. Borderless has been instrumental in shaping this ecosystem — not just financially backing projects like Dabba Network, Geodnet and UpRock, but actively guiding the movement’s evolution in India.
Their insights on founder-investor relationships emphasized that warm introductions from portfolio companies remain the most effective path to funding, while building a presence on X (Twitter) within niche communities significantly boosts discovery chances.
India’s Unique Position
What makes India the perfect testing ground for DePIN? Our research identified key factors that position the country for explosive growth in this sector:
With 700 million+ smartphones where users spend 4+ hours daily but consume only 24.1GB of their monthly data, India has a vast untapped computing resource waiting to be activated.
The 15 million gig workers (growing to 23.5 million by 2030) represent a digitally savvy workforce already trained in app-based incentive systems — perfect candidates to transition from platform dependence to network stakeholders.
India’s unique challenges — from urban congestion to air pollution to energy disparities — create fertile ground for solutions that align individual incentives with the public good.
The Shift From Platform to Protocol
The first wave of India’s digital transformation gave us centralized platforms connecting users but retaining control and value. The next wave — embodied by DePIN — creates open protocols where participants share ownership and rewards.
This evolution mirrors India’s own journey — bootstrapping digital infrastructure first, then using it to solve physical challenges at unprecedented scale.
For forward-thinking institutions and investors, this represents perhaps the decade’s most significant infrastructure opportunity. Tomorrow’s industry leaders will emerge from entities that bridge digital coordination with physical deployment, creating systems where participants become stakeholders.
▶️ Dive deeper into India’s DePIN revolution.
Read the complete report here:
