Ice Thrown on DePIN burns? 🧊🔥

January 9th, 2026

Author

DePIN Digest
January 09, 2026

GM, happy Friday. We’ve got an eventful edition of the Digest locked and loaded for ya today.

Helium announced this week a halt on subscriber-fueled buybacks and burns of its native token $HNT, citing no discernable effect. Buybacks using carrier offload revenue continue, with the newly freed income used to fund network expansion.

Dabba Network keeps growing, posting impressive stats all year, notably hitting 75,000 deployed hotspots (before their TGE).

0G Labs had a “look ma, I’m on Korean TV!” moment, starring in a feature on YTN’s ‘The Strongest Enterprise.’

Last but certainly not least, XMAQUINA did it again, selling out their final community auction in under 30 minutes, with additional tranches opened after, bringing the total raised to $10M.

Not a bad start to 2026!

🤝 Making Friends

This first week also brought some new connections:

 🤝 Silencio x OORT - Decentralized AI Infrastructure
 🤝 USDAI x Aravolta - Analytics Partnership
 🔌 Aethir x Chainlink - Interoperability Standards
 🔌 Crust Network x Base - Crust Files Base App Integration

While we’re on the subject, DAWN recently reflected on 2025’s major milestones: Reaching 4 million households, the Black Box announcement, and a major fundraising round.

Fast forward to this week, and Karrier One launched its OTT app with SCION encryption and an AI assistant, while World Mobile Network’s Builder auction went live.

The world gets closer every day. 📶

💎 Tantalizing Tokenomics

Some of the primary drivers of this newfound network connectivity are token ecosystems. DePIN knows them well:

Let’s make some noise for DePIN tokens.

🤖 Robotic Navigations 🗺️

Anyone else heading to ETH Denver? I’ll be there, and 0G Labs will be too, as a sponsor.

We’ll make some space for ya while we check out Decen Space’s 2026 partner mission, Pilot Platform, and hardware testing stations. Delysium will make room too, having halved daily DMA $AGI emissions from 350k to 175k.

LayerDrone casually increased coverage by more than 300%, mapping 5.5M acres in 2025, as NATIX continues its impressive road-mapping as detailed in its December update.

Qualoo’s #DoubleItMapIt campaign rewards began distributing this week, ROVR hit an ATH in token burns, and Onocoy reflected on impressive growth in 2025.

💻 Cracking the Code

Crack open a cold one and roll out the hydro-cooling systems cause PinLink announced a $25k $PIN buyback. You’ll need the cold, cause USDAI brought the heat by delivering 576 NVIDIA B300s recently as part of its AI datacenter investment.

More milestones from DePIN compute: Acurast hit 300,000 deployments, NodeOps reached $4.55M in revenue, and Nosana highlighted 3 million jobs and 3 million job hours completed.

The numbers keep growing, as ar.io exemplifies with its network, backed by consistent shipping of updates and upgrades.

Speaking of, AIOZ released its own major update this week, with more project releases in tow.

UpRock shipped its v16 desktop client update, Render’s Network Manager went live, Flux launched a single-instance FluxCloud deployment, and ANyONe Protocol released a community staker transparency tool. 

Titan also released a browser plugin upgrade and secured 10M IP proxy demand. 

What’s better than capping it off with a recap… ANyONe?

📋 Updates & Reports

Let’s wrap it up with a classic clipboard-style list of quality reads:

👋 See ya next week!

Thanks for stopping by. You have yourself a wonderful weekend, friend. Be sure to follow the Digest on X as well as Will and Yours Truly, and stay tuned for some pretty BIG updates incoming… 🤫