DePIN is a lifeline for Bitcoin miners, says Livepeer CEO

Bitcoin (BTC) miners might turn to the DePIN ecosystem to turn mining facilities profitable after the latest halving cut block rewards to 3.125 BTC, shared Livepeer CEO Doug Petkanics with Crypto Briefing. DePIN is short for decentralized physical infrastructure network, a blockchain industry sector that brings transparency and decentralization to the real world.

Petkanics highlights that this movement to DePIN, where the business model is usually providing computing power through GPUs to artificial intelligence-focused companies, is met with good and bad news for Bitcoin miners.

“The hardware that they’ve bought and deployed and paid for Bitcoin mining are really specific to Bitcoin. Their ASICs, they can only mine Bitcoin. They can only do that specific cash function. They really can’t be redeployed into other networks. I think that’s the bad news. But that’s not surprising. That’s what they knew their investment was and they knew they were optimizing for.”

On the opposite side, the expertise and surrounding infrastructure that the facilities built up around mining crypto are really efficient when it comes to energy usage, bandwidth, and operational management, Petkanics points out. This characteristics can be proven useful when managing a

The expectation after the April 20 halving is that electricity and overall production costs will nearly double, according to a report by asset management firm CoinShares. The report also sheds light on that mining companies like BitDigital, Hive, and Hut 8 are already generating income from artificial intelligence (AI).

“All that expertise and resources absolutely can be repurposed into one of the sort of biggest opportunities of this point in time that we’re in right now, due to the just massive amount of computing resources that are going to be required when it comes to this paradigm shift of artificial intelligence models being this new technology that’s changing everything about how people interact with technology.”

Fostering development

According to Livepeer CEO, decentralized computing power networks offer benefits in different layers. The first is related to how the GPU market is organized, where tech firms must buy large batches of graphic chips to achieve a cheaper acquisition price.

However, these companies usually don’t have immediate usage for all the GPU acquired, and that’s where DePIN shows its potential by letting computing power be lent.

“I think that actually fits really neatly into this notion that decentralized networks can let anyone who’s paid for that capacity, but has it sitting idle, make it available to developers that want to use it temporarily via open marketplaces.”

Moreover, the necessity to buy large batches of GPU is also a threshold to companies such as data centers and infrastructure providers. This is also another issue that can be solved by DePIN, as these smaller companies can tap into the dormant capacities of these idle graphic chips via an open marketplace, Petkanics underscored.

“You don’t have the overhead or the bureaucracy of needing contracts and customer relationships and sales and the stuff that adds a lot of cost on top of just sort of connecting directly to the computing power.”