DePIN projects reached a valuation of $10 billion by the end of 2025, thanks to the generation of $72 million in on-chain transactions. This wide gap between valuation and revenue supports the firm’s assessment that the sector was materially undervalued despite signs of lasting utility.
According to market analysis, the DePIN sector reached a valuation of $10 billion by the end of 2025 thanks to its on-chain revenue of $72 million. This figure implied unusually low revenue multiples for an infrastructure-class thesis.
Analysts highlighted that price-to-sales (P/S) multiples had compressed to approximately 10x–25x, a far cry from the speculative extremes of around 1,000x seen in 2021. This compression placed DePIN in a relatively uncomfortable middle ground, generating fluctuations in its value and a clear risk for some investors.
In the short term, traders have little incentive to maintain bets on DePIN infrastructure, while many others believe that current returns are too high when revenue streams are barely being generated. The result was limited demand from both sides, contributing to the sector’s subdued profile despite technical progress.
Will DePIN continue to maintain its market value?
DePIN projects are, for the most part, geared toward verifiable revenue generation and infrastructure deployment. This maturation fostered resilience: on-chain revenue continued to grow during market weakness, and several projects exhibited entrepreneurial characteristics that typically attract long-term allocators.
However, a real gap exists between what is happening and material knowledge. Funds often lack the analytical framework needed to value DePIN projects, and this gap led some investors to overlook sustainable cash flows and replace them with heuristics more suited to speculative tokens.
For DePIN, the $10 billion mark represented an undervalued relative to its long-term utility, arguing that the market had not yet internalized DePIN’s role as a fundamental layer for Web3 infrastructure and its potential to disrupt incumbent cloud providers.
Investors are now focused on whether deployments and measurable revenue growth accelerate in the coming years; projections indicating the sector could scale to a dramatically larger market by 2028 will serve as a practical test of that thesis.
If revenue trajectories fall short of current expectations, multiples are likely to be repriced; if they do, the sector’s risk-reward profile will change materially for both fundamental and long-term investors.
