🦾 Real Recognize Real

Good morning Deployers, happy Friday! Matt here, bringing you the latest issue of The Relay Weekly.

We’ve been busy tee’ing up conversations with some of the biggest names in distributed infrastructure.

The long and short of it?

Robots are coming. DePIN revenue is growing. But in a space full of big claims, you need to know how to separate the chaff from what’s real. 

We recently sat down with two people who do exactly that. One from the investment side, one from the research side. 

Let’s take a closer look 👓

📡 On the Radar

• XMAQUINA, the DAO that invests in private humanoid robotics companies, eyes TGE date.

• Messari’s Dylan Bane breaks down tips to identify legitimate networks.

• Auki Network makes the case for robots as coordination tools rather than replacements.

• Tashi Protocol hit the stage at the invite-only Capital Access Forum in Singapore

• DePIN companies hit ~$72M in onchain verified revenue in 2025, and 2026 is looking even better.

Time to break it down. 👇

🛰️ The Relay

Last Wednesday, we sat down with Mauricio Zolliker from XMAQUINA to talk robotics and access.

XMAQUINA is a DAO (think community-owned company) that takes direct preferred share investments in private humanoid robotics companies. These kinds of deals are normally locked behind accredited investor gates. 

Their approach relies on deep dive research, an advisory scoring committee, and weighted community votes before any capital gets deployed. They're not chasing 100x gems. They're betting on blue chips, AKA the Apptroniks and Figure AIs of the world, while they're still private.

Amazon just acquired two robotics companies in seven days, which means robotics investment isn't slowing down. Quite the opposite. And XMAQUINA is positioning everyday people to own a piece of it.

TGE window is open now through August, with governance v2 rolling out alongside it. 

Stay in the loop about what they’re building here.

🔎 Vaporware Need Not Apply

This Thursday, we also released our conversation with Dylan Bane, senior research analyst at Messari and co-author of the State of DePIN 2025 report.

While Mauricio and XMAQUINA vet private robotics companies for investment, Dylan vets DePIN projects for legitimacy. Same question, but viewed through a different lens.

Dylan’s framework is straightforward. He looks for founder quality, demand-side validation, and verifiable on-chain revenue. His go-to litmus test looks at tokenomics. For DePIN, that’s buy-and-burn. If a project buys back tokens and burns them using real revenue, that value is gone. It’s the hardest thing to fake, and a mark that a company has genuine income and real value.

According to his research, DePIN hit ~$72M in onchain verified revenue in 2025. Factor in offchain, and it's closer to $200-300M. This is real money being spent on real infrastructure, but most folks still don’t know it yet.

Read more deep research from Messari here.

🔊 Signal Boost

A couple more network stories reinforcing this week's theme:

🧠 Auki Network — Auki’s founder, Nils, makes the case that robots won't simply replace human labor, but coordinate it. Robotics needs a spatial coordination layer, and that's where distributed infrastructure comes in. If you're bullish on robotics, the coordination stack underneath it matters just as much.

🏛️ Tashi Protocol — Speaking of coordination, Tashi took the stage at the Capital Access Forum in Singapore, a high-signal invite-only conference. For a protocol building at the intersection of distributed infrastructure and real-world applications, that's a big room to be in. 

👋 Stay in the Loop

Real recognizes real. Right now, the projects proving it are the ones building with demand, revenue, and access in mind. Share this issue with someone who needs to hear it.

Catch the next Relay live on X. Follow Matt and Will for updates throughout the week.

Have a great Easter weekend, and we'll catch you next Friday! ✌️