Written by: Syndica

Compiled by: Zen, PANews

The Solana ecosystem's DePIN track revenue reached a new high year-to-date, with a cumulative monthly revenue of $458,000 in April, up 33% year-on-year, marking the best performance this year. This is mainly attributed to the stable growth of projects such as Helium, Render, Hivemapper, and XNET.

However, the number of active contributors to the DePIN protocol has actually seen a slight decline. Helium, Hivemapper, Nosana, Render, Sallar, Sourceful, and XNET collectively maintained about 87,000 active contributors.

In April 2025, the number of contributors to small DePIN protocols saw significant growth, with Nosana's growth rate exceeding 100%, while larger protocol contributors like Helium and Hivemapper saw flat or slightly declining growth.

The following is a review of the performance of major DePIN projects:

Dabba Network

Dabba Network is a India-exclusive DePIN based on Solana, aiming to deploy Wi-Fi hotspots across India in cooperation with local cable operators through a 'managed deployment' model to provide users with high-speed, low-cost internet access. From March to April, its cumulative data consumption surged to 8,000 TB, achieving a 2-fold growth; during the same period, device sales increased by 29%, further expanding the network scale.

Helium Mobile

Helium Mobile is a mobile virtual network operator under the Helium network, combining community-deployed Wi-Fi hotspots with cellular base stations from partner operators to provide users with low-cost mobile data and voice services.

After Helium Mobile opened free mobile plans to all users, the number of new subscription users skyrocketed by 125% to 36,000, setting a historical high. Correspondingly, Helium Mobile's revenue reached a record $250,000. Revenue for the month, measured by data token destruction, increased by 34% to reach a new high of $250,000, with data offload accounting for 79%.

(Note: When users utilize mobile networks, some traffic is 'offloaded' to hotspots on the Helium network for transmission and billing, and this portion of traffic is referred to as 'offload data' — that is, 'unloaded data volume' or 'data offload traffic.')

In addition, Helium Mobile's average daily subscription uninstallation volume increased by 65%, and uninstallation data volume grew by 32%, both setting historical records.

It is worth mentioning that since 2025, the number of active contributors to Helium has shown a slight downward trend, stabilizing at around 75,000 active contributors.

XNET

XNET is a decentralized mobile network built on the Solana blockchain. In April, XNET data offload continued to grow, with the average daily offload volume increasing by 16%, marking eight consecutive months of steady growth in data offload for XNET. Additionally, despite a 6% decrease in rewards, the number of active contributors for XNET Mobile in April still rose by 6%, reaching a historic high of 732.

Roam

In April, Roam added 535,000 WiFi nodes (the second-highest in history) and 87,000 new users, bringing the total number of protocol nodes close to 4 million and the number of users nearing 3 million. Although the monthly user check-in volume decreased by 19%, the cumulative check-in count has surpassed 300 million times, demonstrating strong user stickiness.

Shaga

The Shaga protocol utilizes idle GPU computing power to support Web3 gaming, currently covering 74 GPU models, providing 33.12 TB of storage and 15.27 Gbps throughput, with high-performance computing capabilities. Over the course of two months, Shaga achieved 4,500 interactive game livestreams, totaling 50,000 hours, allowing viewers to control and participate in the streamer's game in real-time.

Hivello

Hivello, as a DePIN aggregation platform, is used to monetize idle resources; in April, online duration doubled compared to March, with more nodes joining to contribute to the network.

Nosana

Nosana is a decentralized GPU computing network built on the Solana blockchain, focusing on providing a distributed computing power market for AI inference workloads. In April, Nosana's job completion volume (each time an AI client submits an inference request on the Nosana network, the request is assigned to one or more GPU nodes for execution. The entire process from beginning calculation to returning results is referred to as a 'job') and contributor rewards saw slight growth, with GPU nodes remaining stable; the newly launched Gaianet AI collaborative project allows AI agents to run on Nosana infrastructure to drive job growth.

Sallar.io

Sallar is a protocol built by connecting the idle computing power of devices such as smartphones to the network, forming distributed computing nodes to support high-performance computing needs. In April, Sallar's dollar rewards increased by 27% month-on-month. As a protocol that shares device computing power to complete AI tasks, dollar rewards in April rose to $11,800, with the number of active wallets remaining stable.

Grass

Grass provides underlying data sources for AI training, data scraping, and proxy services by connecting the idle internet bandwidth of user devices to the network and rewards participants in the form of on-chain tokens. In April, Grass's data collection volume set a new historical high, reaching 34.5 million GB.

Wingbits

Wingbits is a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) project based on the Solana blockchain, which collects real-time data on aircraft such as planes, helicopters, and drones through ADS-B hardware deployed by global users and uploads this data to the blockchain in exchange for native token rewards. Since November 2024, the number of flights tracked by the Wingbits network has increased to 150,000, with daily data points collected rising to 9 billion, up 7% and 29% respectively; the number of contribution sites has also increased by 43% to reach 3,000.

Hivemapper

Hivemapper is a decentralized mapping network where users collect street-level imagery through dashcams to earn HONEY token rewards. The team continues to iterate on the product, with 20-30% of the monthly Beekeeper platform fees being used to burn $HONEY, which may further promote growth.

Hivemapper's monthly mapping mileage remained stable in April, and its AI-driven platform for fleet management, Beekeeper, officially launched that month, which will bring new growth momentum as more fleets join. Since February, the number of active map contributors for Hivemapper has stabilized at around 5,000.

NATIX Network

The NATIX Network aims to collect street view and geographic data through smartphones and dedicated devices, providing high-precision positioning and imaging support for map making, autonomous driving, and physical AI. Participants can earn token rewards for data contributions. The ecosystem remained stable in April, with user-driven mileage maintaining at 11 million kilometers for the third consecutive month.

Sourceful Energy

Sourceful Energy focuses on decentralized virtual power plants (VPP), connecting household and commercial distributed energy resources (such as solar panels, electric vehicles, energy storage batteries, etc.) to the Solana blockchain network, where participants can earn token incentives for contributing electricity or data. In April, Sourceful Energy's electricity output grew by 30%, and with the newly launched Zap smart energy efficiency analysis device receiving 500 reservations, the upward trend is expected to continue.

AmbiosNetwork

Ambios Network has built the world's largest environmental monitoring DePIN by deploying low-cost air quality and environmental sensors, providing real-time, hyper-local environmental data to support enterprises, AI, and public services, with sensor owners able to receive token rewards. In April, Ambios Network's cumulative user ecological data check-ins exceeded 2 million, with ecological data check-in volume increasing by 12%; the total number of platform users rose to 45,000, a year-on-year increase of 2%.