The chicken-and-egg problem of infrastructure
New infrastructure networks face a classic bootstrapping problem: nobody wants to pay for a wireless network with no coverage, and nobody wants to build coverage nobody is paying for. Traditional buildout solves this by having a well-capitalized company absorb years of losses, betting that paying demand will eventually catch up to the infrastructure it built ahead of time.
DePIN tackles the same problem from the other direction. Instead of a company fronting the capital, the network rewards early contributors in its own token, which can be traded or held, even before there is enough paying end-user demand to justify the buildout on revenue alone. If the token has value or the expectation of future value, that alone can be enough to motivate someone to install a hotspot or plug in a spare GPU today.