Depin: Capital Formation And Value-Accrual Structure
Key takeaways
- EV3 raised a second fund totaling $61.74 million and deliberately sized it to the number 6174.
- The main bottleneck for stablecoin-funded credit vaults is safe origination and deployment speed rather than attracting stablecoin deposits, because depositors will chase the highest yield vault they trust.
- Pantera announced leading a $75M round into Mesh, positioned as a Plaid-like network connecting wallets, exchanges, and liquidity providers to enable one-click crypto deposits and payments.
- The guest cites Helium, GeoNet, and Grass as three DePIN networks performing well right now.
- Effective compliance in crypto-fintech is now achievable with existing tooling, making outcomes more a function of willpower and founder character than technical capability.
Sections
Depin: Capital Formation And Value-Accrual Structure
A repeated throughline is that fundraising and underwriting are shifting toward business fundamentals and away from sentiment, while simultaneously acknowledging that token value accrual can decouple from business value. The claimed operational response is to structure early-stage exposure as both equity and tokens, and to anticipate (but not rely on) regulatory clarification that could enable closer linkage. A separate but related delta is that crypto VC capital formation is constrained, with expectations that non-crypto LPs may replace missing crypto fund-of-funds capital.
- EV3 raised a second fund totaling $61.74 million and deliberately sized it to the number 6174.
- EV3's Fund I raise in mid-2022 was difficult and repeatedly resized due to LPs failing or going bankrupt during the bear market.
- The main DePIN upside is driven more by the duration and rate of revenue compounding than by whether the valuation multiple is 10x versus 30x revenue.
- At DePIN pre-seed/seed, holding both equity and tokens is used to mitigate later-stage value-accrual uncertainty when tokens and equity can decouple.
- DePIN revenues should be valued with higher and less cyclical multiples than DeFi revenues because DeFi revenue is more commodity-like and cycle-driven while DePIN revenue resembles SaaS-like business revenue.
- Crypto VC fundraising is described as particularly tough because a prior cohort of crypto-focused fund-of-funds capital has largely disappeared due to weak distributions and increased competition.
Depin And Rwa Financing: Stablecoin-Funded Credit As A Bottlenecked Scaling Path
A proposed financing transition replaces token-emission bootstrapping with stablecoin-yield-funded onchain debt. The key constraint is not deposit demand but safe origination and preservation of principal, which limits scaling speed. A second constraint is user preference for liquidity and short duration, implying additional market infrastructure (curation/duration management) may be necessary for long-duration financing to function.
- The main bottleneck for stablecoin-funded credit vaults is safe origination and deployment speed rather than attracting stablecoin deposits, because depositors will chase the highest yield vault they trust.
- DePIN infrastructure bootstrapping is shifting from speculative utility-token incentives toward onchain debt financing funded by stablecoin yield demand, described as 'ImproFi'.
- USDAI reportedly expanded deposit caps by $150 million and filled them in about 45 minutes while paying roughly T-bill yield plus points.
- For onchain credit products, preserving depositor principal via credit quality is the critical requirement because principal losses destroy trust and are difficult to recover.
- Onchain user behavior is path-dependent toward liquidity and short-duration products due to past experiences with costly emissions and lockups, and this behavior must change for longer-duration RWA/DePIN financing to work.
- Stablecoin supply is over $300 billion, with roughly $15 billion sitting in yield-bearing stablecoin products.
Fintech Middleware And Onchain Adoption: Value Capture And Diffusion
A specific middleware company is introduced as a connector layer enabling simplified deposits/payments across wallets, exchanges, and liquidity sources. In parallel, the corpus claims a 2026 adoption wave among fintechs/brokerages, with a mechanism of social proof from first movers. A key mental-model delta is that value from onchain rails may accrue to adopting businesses rather than base-layer tokens, while the eventual composability of tokenized assets is gated by KYC/AML and market-structure regulation.
- Pantera announced leading a $75M round into Mesh, positioned as a Plaid-like network connecting wallets, exchanges, and liquidity providers to enable one-click crypto deposits and payments.
- A defining megatrend for 2026 will be companies moving parts of their businesses on-chain, especially fintechs, payment providers, and brokerages.
- Whether tokenized assets can be freely traded and integrated into DeFi depends on regulatory requirements around KYC/AML and broader market-structure rules.
- Increased on-chain adoption is expected to primarily improve the economics of the adopting businesses rather than necessarily accruing value to base-layer or infrastructure tokens.
- A prominent first mover can create a social-proof moment that makes it easier for other companies to justify moving on-chain internally.
- Tokenized finance is described as moving irreversibly toward on-chain rails, but whether it is permissionless versus walled-garden remains uncertain.
Depin: Revenue Durability Signals And Transparency Constraints
The corpus asserts that a small set of DePIN networks show multi-year revenue compounding and enterprise traction, and that supply-side networks can remain durable even when demand is weak. It also offers a concrete mechanism for why some revenue stays offchain: customer concentration and negotiating leverage. Several quantitative claims remain unverified within the corpus and are presented as needing external corroboration.
- The guest cites Helium, GeoNet, and Grass as three DePIN networks performing well right now.
- GeoNet and Helium have compounded revenues at roughly 30% quarter-over-quarter consistently for two to three years.
- Grass claims roughly $50M in annualized revenue, and the guest reports verifying most major customer contracts and invoices directly with the CEO and finding the revenue to be real.
- Helium and GeoNet are described as having grown revenue across multiple cycles, being near supply-side scale, and having large enterprise contracts.
- A reason some DePIN projects keep revenue offchain is customer concentration, where disclosing totals can reveal pricing and margins and weaken negotiating leverage.
- Helium's IoT network maintained roughly 550k–600k hotspots after peaking near one million, implying around 10% churn over several years despite traffic being near zero.
Compliance And Public Markets: Enforcement Risk And Ipo Selectivity
The corpus highlights compliance as an operational choice enabled by available tooling, and suggests some high-growth firms may be taking shortcuts, with a concrete rumor used to illustrate potential sanction-evasion risk. Separately, IPO-related deltas suggest a reopening pipeline but with selectivity, and provide an asserted magnitude and market-position claim for a compliance infrastructure firm, while explicitly noting uncertainty about revenue composition.
- Effective compliance in crypto-fintech is now achievable with existing tooling, making outcomes more a function of willpower and founder character than technical capability.
- Chainalysis is described as dominating U.S. government crypto markets and is estimated to be at over $300M run-rate revenue, while its ARR versus services mix is uncertain.
- There remains substantial compliance work to be done in crypto-fintech, and some fast-growing companies are likely taking shortcuts that risk serving prohibited customers.
- A leading IPO underwriter reported working with seven crypto companies on IPO preparations and expects only two to three to be strong public companies.
- A Venezuelan on/off-ramp startup (Contigo) was widely rumored to have facilitated sanction-evasion money flows tied to the state-owned oil company via stablecoin rails.
- Chainalysis is expected to become a public company and may IPO this year.
Watchlist
- The main bottleneck for stablecoin-funded credit vaults is safe origination and deployment speed rather than attracting stablecoin deposits, because depositors will chase the highest yield vault they trust.
- Helium is identified as a candidate to 'do a Carvana' style rebound as a high-volatility asset that could recover dramatically from drawdowns.
- The hosts suspect listener retention drops during the podcast’s content-recommendation section and propose surveying the audience about it.
Unknowns
- Are the reported DePIN revenue growth rates (including the ~30% QoQ compounding claim) corroborated by third-party or standardized disclosures over time?
- What is Grass's customer concentration, renewal profile, and cash-collection reality behind the claimed annualized revenue figure?
- What is the actual onchain-credit loss experience (defaults, delinquencies, recoveries) for stablecoin-funded vaults that finance real-world or DePIN-adjacent assets?
- How quickly can origination capacity scale without degrading underwriting standards, and what objective utilization/turnaround metrics demonstrate this?
- Will onchain markets develop durable demand for longer-duration yield products, or will liquidity preference remain dominant?