DePIN

Tribe Capital’s Evan Park explains why he’s focusing on DePINs and what he’s looking for specifically when being pitched

Two Solana DePIN projects are teaming up to take on big telecom

The “Helium hotspot beacon” is a miniature off-grid cell phone tower that uses Starlink and a Helium hotspot

A look at one of 2024’s breakout DePIN successes

Framework’s Michael Anderson explains why he thinks energy could be a bigger narrative this cycle

DAWN is positioning itself as a decentralized protocol for gigabit-level internet access

VanEck Ventures and VanEck’s Digital Assets Alpha Fund invested $2.5 million in DAWN through a strategic funding round, the teams exclusively told Blockworks

Also, Union Labs announced a $12 million Series A

Austin Federa had been at Solana Labs and Foundation for nearly four years

A DePIN hardware device from Hamburg-based NATIX Network allows Tesla drivers to monetize their travel

AI’s future shouldn’t be decided by a handful of tech giants

Midwest Blockchain Week showed the depth of talent available at US universities while focusing on how memecoins could bring back the retail investor

Spire, Citrea and Nillion also announced raises this week

Wynd Labs CEO Andrej Radonjic explains why Grass is open-sourcing “valuable” AI data

Plus, Gemini’s trying to get a sense of the state of crypto in a new report

Plus, Kamino’s rise to the top of Solana DeFi’s total value locked leaderboard

Other notable rounds came from Vessel, Payman AI, Zoth and Blockscout

A Web3 AI cloud firm also announced a seed raise of $7 million this week

Our interview with Helium Foundation CEO Abhay Kumar

Plus, is crypto sentiment shifting for the better?

The Srcful partnership is part of a broader plan to onboard Helium “subnetworks”

A Swedish energy-focused project named Srcful proposed to become a Helium subnetwork with its own ENERGY token

Plus, Helium’s plans to expand beyond its decentralized wireless mission

Plus, are stablecoins still crypto’s killer app?