Is Depin not great? Grass is the first to disagree, and recently popular ICN is the second to disagree.
What’s the story behind this ICN? Is it really that impressive? Yes, last month NGP @ngpcapital just invested in ICN with a valuation of 470 million USD. You may not have heard of this institution, but you must know Xiaomi, right? A national brand in China, this institution was an early investor in Xiaomi, and also an early investor in projects like Helium and Workfusion.
The money comes from a solid background, and the people are not simple either. The CEO of ICN is Kai Wawrzinek, a German who was the founder and CEO of Goodgame Studios, one of the largest web and mobile game developers in Europe during the Web2 era, with peak annual revenue exceeding 200 million euros and users in over 200 countries, ultimately acquired by the listed company Stillfront.
Why is ICN considered impressive? Mainly because the project data is outstanding; airdrops for projects with real revenue are often significant. 👇
Annual revenue has exceeded 5 million USD, with a year-on-year growth of over 2000%, serving more than 1,000 enterprise clients while maintaining continuous expansion. The current system has over 50PB of real-time operating data, with reserved orders exceeding 250PB, mainly from the European and American markets.
On the node side, ICN generated over 12 million USD in node sales revenue.
In terms of community and network infrastructure, ICN currently has over 250,000 community members and over 220,000 testnet users. The mainnet and $ICNT token are scheduled to officially launch in Q2 2025, with confirmations for listings on multiple mainstream CEX.
📌 Back to the technical aspects.
ICN's features lie not in the concept but in the structure. It covers the three essentials of cloud services: computing, storage, and bandwidth, not as separate entities but as a bundled offering, forming a unified protocol.
In terms of business, over 1,000 enterprise-level customers are currently using it, with the system processing an average of 50 million requests daily, actual data storage exceeding 50PB, and an additional 250PB of reserved orders pending deployment. The platform's revenue has surpassed 5 million USD, which is quite impressive in the depin sector or the entire web3 space.
Currently, infrastructure projects in Web3, especially DePIN, generally face issues of weak delivery capability and poor customer stickiness. ICN chooses the B2B market, starting product design with enterprise needs, ensuring a higher level of stability and standardization compared to protocols that lean towards personal applications.
It can basically be likened to depin + AWS, where the network is co-constructed by users, services purchased by enterprises, underlying architecture can sustainably iterate, and the revenue model is tied to hardware and nodes.
Whether this structure can reach its final scale depends on execution, but its path is indeed much more solid than most DePIN projects.
📌 How to interact.
The token distribution has been confirmed, with a total of 1 billion and an initial circulation of 700 million, of which 20% is allocated to node staking users. With a current valuation of 470 million, this allocation is quite cost-effective!
https://t.co/ieaOqLuepb
If DePIN is to transform from a concept into an industry, ICN's B2B approach deserves long-term attention; I estimate that the expected returns from nodes should not be low, and participation is also an option.