📌 DePIN it to win it

Brought to you by:

Happy Friday!

I’m happy to report that we’ve made it. Those of you in the US have a three-day weekend to look forward to, and the rest of you can look forward to not dealing with the Americans for a day. Win-win!

Just kidding. You’re still getting Empire in your inbox bright and early Monday, so don’t fret!

Anyway, it’s always nice to end the week with bitcoin just $2k off of its new all-time high, especially since it’s been pretty busy. 

This morning, we’re taking a look at a sector we haven’t really talked about in a hot minute. As always, I’m curious to get your takes.

Brought to you by:

Citrea is the first zero-knowledge rollup to enable Bitcoin applications (₿apps) without changing Bitcoin's consensus rules. Its BitVM-based bridge is secured by Bitcoin, extending BTC’s utility in a native, trust-minimized way.

Citrea offers the most Bitcoin-secured path to bring DeFi and other onchain use cases to BTC, marking the beginning of an onchain Bitcoin economy. Citrea is currently on test and approaching mainnet.

Visit Citrea ecosystem page to explore testnet.

It’s been a while since we last talked about DePINs. Blockworks Research analyst Nick Carpinito is giving us the perfect excuse to dig back in after publishing a note that not only focuses on DePINs, but specifically looks at tokenized power plants. And, yes, it’s much more exciting than it initially seems.

Carpinito told me that he felt compelled to dig into the subject because of artificial intelligence. 

“One of the critical pieces of AI today is that you're seeing that the sector as a whole, outside of the decentralized piece, is having some serious energy constraints, especially outside the US, but even in the US,” he explained. So he did a deep dive to see just how viable it is. 

The long and short of it is that “projects that credibly tie infrastructure performance to real-world revenue, navigate policy fragmentation, and maintain network quality will be well-positioned to shape the next generation of energy markets.”

But if this is the first time you’re hearing about these types of DePINs, you’re not alone. I asked Carpinito about that, and he explained that wireless tends to be one of the most popular subsectors within DePIN — something that does track with what we’ve previously covered in Empire.

There’s been “very little innovation in the energy space,” he said. It’ll take time to see “meaningful scale,” but Carpinito isn’t too worried about that. 

In fact, his hot take is that some projects could start operating as “pieces in the grid” in the coming year. 

And now you know. 

The theory I’ve been working on is the successful use case of DePINs. RWAs and stablecoins have seen great success, and DePINs follow a bit of a similar model. You take a non-crypto industry and put it on crypto rails, not only to improve it, but to open doors for non-crypto folks to come onchain. Sounds like it matches the recipe for success we’ve seen, yeah?

Admittedly, reality is slightly more complicated. 

“If a DePIN project is successful when they're pitching to a customer, they shouldn't have to call themselves DePIN. The advantages of the product should be clear, both on a cost standpoint and on a performance standpoint. And the projects that are successful with this…are able to position themselves as valuable, real-world utilities [that don’t] have a very high barrier to entry,” Carpinito explained.

In lots of ways, “it’s very similar to stablecoins, maybe even a lower barrier to entry than most stablecoins for the end customer. The other component of that is — and this is probably one of the things that attracted me to DePINs in the early days —- it's compelling and, I think, really [opens up] the narrative that everybody needs to buy their first token.”

Now, we just need to get more non-crypto native folks onchain.

The Most Talent-Dense 72 Hours in Crypto

DeFi’s evolving. Real-world assets, capital formation, talent reshoring — it’s all in play.

Consumer apps are hitting mainnet — mobile-native, sticky, and finally usable.

AI is going onchain: agents, GPUs, verifiable training…

And the people building all of it? They’ll be in Brooklyn for 3 days.

• Sreeram Kannan from Eigenlayer

• Ali Yahya from a16z

• Aasey Caruso from Topology

• Danny Ryan from ETH core

• Founders and leaders from MegaETH, Helus, Jito, Supra, Anza, and more

📆 June 24-26 | Brooklyn

Last week, I asked: How’re we feeling about memecoins?

We’re all in alignment, apparently, with 100% of you answering that you’re focused on the big picture and don’t have time for them. 

Message received! 

This week, I’m wondering: