Merry Christmas, DePIN 🎄

December 19th, 2025

Author

DePIN Digest
December 19, 2025

GM, happy Friday, and Merry Christmas to you! It’s Matt, bringing you the 2nd-to-last Digest in 2025. Don’t worry, we’ll still be here in the new year.

While 2025 was an incredible year for DePIN (Messari agrees), 2026 is tee’d up to look even better. 

First on the chopping block: Predictive Oncology, the brain behind the Aethir Digital Asset Treasury, rebranded to Axe Compute, highlighting cost reductions of DePINs.

NATO hunted for drone tracking and spatial intelligence, selecting both 4Dsky and Neuron for the DIANA 2026 Challenge Program in Europe, as IoTeX achieved full MiCa compliance on the continent.

0G, the AI-focused L1, gave us a post-TGE recap with impressive stats, DAWN raised $13M in its Series B, and USDAI partnered with PayPal to integrate $PYUSD for AI infrastructure investment while preparing for a protocol upgrade.

Lastly, DeNet got into the holiday spirit with a themed update for its Watcher Nodes.

🤝 We Three Partnerships

If USDAI’s partnership with PayPal is a main course, we’ve got some great desserts for ya:

 đź¤ť Fractals Sync x XNET - Powering Future Emissions
 đź¤ť Xmaquina x Virtuals Protocol - Final $DEUS public sale
 đź¤ť Roam x Uquid - Collaboration for Web3 Shopping

Now grab a toothpick and chew on these updates:

 đź“‹ NodeOps - Weekly Snapshot
 đź“‹ BrushO - Weekly Update
 đź“‹ ANyONe - Ecosystem Page Revamp
 đź“‹ Beamable - Releases $BMB Token Page

đź’» All I Want for Christmas is GPU

Aethir led the charge in DePIN compute this week, now offering dedicated NVIDIA B200 compute at $3.19/hr. Acurast sprinted forward as well with 250,000 total compute deployments, while ARO surpassed 350,000 registered nodes worldwide.

Flux is on cloud nine with its $FACT Nodes at $7.30/mo, and recently added KdaCed Chainweb Nodes to the marketplace for $15/mo. Need a grant? Nosana just launched a grant program for decentralized AI creators, and Filecoin integrated x402 support on Lighthouse for USDC payments on Base.

Meanwhile, Theta Network is keeping the pencil sharp with a TDRAP 2.0 whitepaper on AI and compute incentives. At the same time, DataGram launched a VPN beta on its Discord, and Bless began Chapter 1 testing for its data layer on the same platform.

But enough calculating, let’s unwrap some rewards.

đź’Ž Season's Stakings

It wouldn’t be a DePIN newsletter without token treats:

It really is the most wonderful time of the year.

⚡ Silent Night, Smart Plugs

DePIN projects are known for keeping their head down and building, but the silence was broken this week with Arkreen’s announcement of the next-gen PGP Smart Plug. Minima also announced beta versions of its ThunderPay and MiniMask for cross-border and browser-based transactions, respectively.

Peaq updated its app to include the Hardware Store for earning devices, AIOZ made some necessary integrations to AIOZ AI, and DeGPT released v0.1.126 with GPT-5.2 support. And for 0G holders, Christmas Eve brings a gift: Alignment Node licenses migrate to 0G Chain on December 24th.

🗺️ Charting Chimney Routes

Mapping out the holiday, NATIX launched WorldSeek for real-world visual data searching using VLM, Qualoo participated in the Crypto’s Got Talent event, and Over the Reality reportedly doubled mapper onboarding.

In comms, Chirp announced the end of its early supporter reward pool in Q1 of 2026, while Dabba Network reports 250,000+ daily WiFi logins and projects $6M in $DBT to be burned in 2026. Time will tell whether Dabba reaches such an ambitious goal, but recent growth trends are optimistic. 

Finally, the infrastructure-of-infrastructure DoubleZero adds more network routes, hitting 275 Gbps total while announcing the launch of its new Ecosystem page.

đź‘‹ See You Soon!

Thanks for taking this journey with us. We’re glad you’re here. Have a great holiday, be sure to follow Matt, Will, and the Digest on X, check out our articles at snacktime, and we’ll catch ya later.