Waiting for my JFK to Mombasa flight to board, a few thoughts reflecting on this year’s @DePINSummit First off, thank you to @shareinternet, @threefold_io and our chief of staff @EV3Steen for putting together a great event So, why bring DePIN Summit to Kenya and Tanzania?

Internet penetration in East Africa is only 30-40%. The majority of population lives entirely without Internet Forget offload, spectrum licenses, max speeds, latency etc etc - there’s 75 MILLION people who lack access to any internet at all across Kenya and Tanzania alone For the people who do have internet, median speeds are <20Mbps. In the US, that’s too slow to qualify for federal funding from the FCC Forget internet: > half the population of Tanzania (as of 2022) lacks reliable access to power at their homes > over 70% of roads are unpaved and unmapped; governments are implementing the first national addressing systems > 25-40% of homes lack reliable access to clean drinking water

DePIN can help economies like Kenya and Tanzania "leapfrog" developed markets with fundamentally better solutions: fixed wireless vs fiber, solar energy and batteries vs fossil fuels, atmospheric water generators, 3D printed buildings, etc. Without regulatory capture and technology debt inherited from 1990s-2000s architecture, DePIN can create composable and performant base layer infrastructure without having to deal with legacy incumbents (as much). The demand for core commodities in these markets is effectively infinite, but over the past few decades supply of performant infrastructure has proven extremely difficult to build and finance. DePIN fixes this.

We like to do things our own way. The first DePIN Summits in SF (2023) and NYC (2024) brought together the community in a way that hadn’t been done before. With the sector maturing and projects hosting dozens of DePIN events at every crypto conference, we felt it was time to think outside the box to create an event that will keep pushing the space forward, accelerating momentum in markets that currently get very little love from the (western) DePIN community. Over the next decade, we hope to see many more DePINs being built in and for communities in Africa

We’re thrilled to have speakers like @nikil511 from @WeatherXM, @AlirezaGhods2 from @NATIXNetwork, @dylangbane from @MessariCrypto and others coming from abroad to help expand DePIN’s horizons to East Africa, alongside many talented local entrepreneurs, investors and regulators

If you’re interested to follow along, follow @DePINSummit to get the highlights from this year’s event 🚀 And if you’re based near Mombasa or Zanzibar, sign up for the event here:

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