Original title: Deep Dive: Solana DePIN

Original author: Syndica

Original translation: Zen, PANews

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

However, the number of active contributors to the DePIN protocol has actually decreased slightly. Helium, Hivemapper, Nosana, Render, Sallar, Sourceful, and XNET collectively maintain about 87,000 active contributors.

In April 2025, the number of contributors to small DePIN protocols significantly increased, with Nosana's growth rate exceeding 100%, while the growth of large protocols' contributors, such as Helium and Hivemapper, remained flat or slightly declined.

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

Dabba Network

Dabba Network is a DePIN tailored for the Indian market built on Solana, aiming to deploy Wi-Fi hotspots across India in collaboration with local cable operators using 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 twofold increase; during the same period, device sales grew by 29%, further expanding 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, new subscription users surged by 125%, reaching a record high of 36,000, leading to a record income of $250,000 for Helium Mobile. Revenue for the month, measured by data point destruction, increased by 34%, reaching a new high of $250,000, with offload data accounting for 79%.

(Note: When users access the mobile network, some traffic is 'offloaded' to the hotspots of the Helium network for transmission and billing, and this portion of traffic is referred to as 'offload data' - that is, 'offload data volume' or 'data offloading traffic'). Furthermore, Helium Mobile's average daily offload subscription volume increased by 65%, with offload data volume rising by 32%, both breaking historical records.

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

XNET

XNET is a decentralized mobile network built on the Solana blockchain. In April, XNET data offloading continued to grow, with an average daily offloading volume increasing by 16%, marking 8 months of steady growth in data offloading for XNET. Additionally, despite a 6% decrease in rewards, the number of active contributors to XNET Mobile in April still rose by 6%, reaching a record 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 close to 3 million. Although the monthly user check-in volume decreased by 19%, the cumulative check-in count has surpassed 300 million, demonstrating that user stickiness remains strong.

Shaga

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

Hivello

Hivello serves as a DePIN aggregation platform to monetize idle resources, with online duration doubling in April compared to March as more nodes joined 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, the job completion volume in Nosana (whenever an AI client submits an inference request, the network assigns that request to one or more GPU nodes to execute. The entire process from the start of computation to the return of results is called a 'job') slightly increased along with contributor rewards, while GPU nodes remained stable; the newly launched Gaianet AI collaboration project allows AI agents to run on Nosana's infrastructure or drive job growth.

Sallar.io

Sallar is a protocol built on connecting idle computing power from devices like smartphones to form distributed computing nodes, thus supporting high-performance computing needs. In April, Sallar's dollar rewards increased by 27% month-on-month. As a protocol for sharing device computing power to complete AI tasks, dollar rewards rose to $11,800, with the number of active wallets remaining stable.

Grass

Grass connects the idle internet bandwidth of user devices to provide underlying data sources for AI training, data scraping, and proxy services, rewarding participants in the form of on-chain tokens. In April, Grass's data collection volume reached a historic high of 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 airplanes, helicopters, and drones through globally deployed ADS-B hardware by 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 3,000.

Hivemapper

Hivemapper is a decentralized map network where users collect street-level images through dash cams to earn HONEY token rewards. The team continues to iterate on the product side, with 20-30% of the monthly Beekeeper platform fees being used to destroy $HONEY, further promoting growth.

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

NATIX Network

NATIX Network aims to collect street view and geographic data through smartphones and dedicated devices, providing high-precision positioning and imaging support for mapping, autonomous driving, and physical AI, with participants receiving 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 is centered around 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 chain network, where participants can receive 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 growth trend is expected to continue.

Ambios Network

Ambios Network has built the world's largest environmental monitoring DePIN, providing real-time, hyper-localized environmental data by deploying low-cost air quality and environmental sensors to support businesses, 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 increased to 45,000, a year-on-year growth of 2%.

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