Coordinated with Fredrik
The one-line version
A founder who was inside a real DePIN experiment explains why the original pitch is over, what survived the collapse, and where the coordination idea actually lives now.
What this episode is about
The DePIN that was sold in 2021 and 2022 — tokens at the center of physical infrastructure, supply side bootstrapped by hardware buyers chasing rewards — is over. Not struggling. Over.
This episode makes that claim from the inside. I was part of an approved Helium governance proposal for an energy subnetwork (HIP 128). The process worked. The governance was honest. We still walked away. I explain why, and I use the Rowan Energy collapse, the Helium Mobile pivot, and a 25-minute debate between two AI-generated voices to stress-test the argument from every angle before landing on where I think the real answer is.
Short version of the thesis: the insight underneath DePIN — that coordinating distributed physical assets is the hard problem, not building more of them — is still correct. The mechanism was wrong. Tokens were the wrong layer for energy. Regulated markets, SPV financing, and boring bank-denominated contracts are what actually move batteries onto grids.
What you’ll hear
An honest production disclosure up front. The voice narrating the episode is a cloned version of mine, running through ElevenLabs, reading a script I wrote and iterated on with Claude. Partway through, I hand off to an entirely separate AI pipeline — a 25-minute NotebookLM debate between two synthetic voices arguing opposite sides of the DePIN question. I did not write or voice that debate. I commissioned the research behind it and let the model render the conversation. Every sound wave in this episode is synthesized. Every idea and editorial choice is mine.
Then the pizza kitchen metaphor, which is the best description of the DePIN failure mode I’ve come across. You paid for the ovens. You laid the tile. You wired the lights. Opening day, they charge you for the box and hand you a slice of plain crust. The betrayal was never about the pizza. It was the realization that your labor wasn’t an investment in a shared community. It was a way for the founders to avoid paying upfront construction costs.
Then Rowan Energy. A British startup that sold a 1,500 pound SmartMiner with the promise of 450 pounds a year in token rewards from your existing rooftop solar. A capped supply of 545 million RWN. A peak market cap in the hundreds of millions. In April 2025, a white-hat researcher found a hidden mint function in the contract. Actual supply closer to 945 million. The CEO stonewalled, blamed an “unauthorized access point,” then quietly retired the token in June 2025 and disappeared. I covered Rowan in episodes 1 and 2 of this podcast, back when the whole production pipeline was a Grok-plus-NotebookLM experiment. Go listen if you want the full timeline.
Then HIP 128. Our proposal for an energy subnetwork inside Helium. Approved. Transparent. Everything decentralized governance is supposed to be. And still the wrong home for energy coordination — because Helium was pivoting to mobile at the same time, because energy is a fundamentally different physical layer from telecom, and because the tokenomics were so complex that almost nobody holding HNT at the time could have reasoned about the reward flows end-to-end. Not a dig at Helium. A structural observation.
Then the NotebookLM debate. Pro: DePIN has hit a revenue inflection point and is now the backbone of the AI compute economy. Con: the original decentralized premise is dead and the survivors are quietly centralizing. I play it in full, then come back and react.
My reaction, in short: both sides are partially right. GPU compute for AI is the one place where DePIN demand is structural and independent of token mechanics — strip the token out and Render, Aethir, and io.net still have paying customers. That’s the test. The con side is also right that the survivors are centralizing the parts that matter, and I see that as maturation, not betrayal. Where I push on both debaters is Helium Mobile. Operationally it works. The carriers are happy. HNT is down roughly 90 percent from peak and the CEO had to personally buy 15 million dollars of token to stabilize a dumping early investor. That’s three different verdicts on the same network depending on whose pocket you measure from.
Then the piece I know best. Energy DePIN is not at an inflection point. It is not quietly centralizing successfully. It is, at any scale that matters, not working. The reason is not ideological. Grid connections need named legal entities. Insurers need named counterparties. Utilities need contracts. Safety certifications need accountable signatures. A misconfigured battery can start a fire. A miscommunicating inverter can destabilize a feeder. None of that maps to a permissionless token model.
What works in energy is the boring version. SPVs financing batteries. Long-term service agreements with property owners. FCR, mFRR, spot arbitrage, capacity contracts. All denominated in euros, dollars, kronor. All flowing through banks that have been around since the 1900s. That’s what we built at Sourceful. We kept the coordination insight and plugged it into regulated money.
Closing note on the production arc. Episodes 1 and 2 were fully AI-generated, undisclosed in the audio itself. This episode puts everything on the table. The voice is a clone. The embedded debate is NotebookLM. The ideas and direction are mine. Same experiment, better pipeline, more honest about what it is.
Pull quotes
“DePIN is dead. Dead in the way it was thought of in the beginning. The DePIN we were sold in 2021, 2022 — tokens at the center of physical infrastructure — that version is over.”
“The betrayal isn’t just about the pizza. It’s the realization that your labor wasn’t an investment in a shared community at all. It was just a way for the founders to avoid paying upfront construction costs.” (from the NotebookLM debate)
“Helium’s governance worked. It was honest. It was accountable. And we got a yes.” (on HIP 128)
“It is entirely possible to build a useful decentralized network AND destroy value for the people who bankrolled the bootstrapping. Those two things are not the same thing.”
“A reliable business partner with a bank account and an engineering team is worth more than any token incentive.”
“The companies that figured this out don’t call themselves DePIN anymore. They call themselves AI infrastructure companies. Telecom offload providers. Grid services operators.”
“DePIN is dead. Long live coordination.”
Production disclosure
Narration: ElevenLabs voice clone of Fredrik, reading a script Fredrik wrote. Embedded debate (~25 minutes, middle of episode): Google NotebookLM, two synthetic voices, research brief commissioned by Fredrik. Script iteration: Claude. Editorial direction: all Fredrik.
Every voice in this episode is synthesized. Every idea is not.
References
* Episodes 1 and 2 — The Rise and Fall of Rowan Energy and The Great Green Heist
Reach out
If you want to argue with me about the Helium Mobile nuance, push back on the energy thesis, or compare notes on running distributed infrastructure without a token — the inbox is open.
Marcus Aurelius: loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight.
