For the past decade, the cloud has been dominated by a few giant providers: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. They made it easy to launch applications at scale, but their dominance came with costs. Renting high-end GPUs like NVIDIA’s 1 H100 can cost between $7.57 and $11 per hour on centralized providers, translating into $40,000+ per month for sustained use. For AI startups and Web3 builders, these costs are not just painful; they’re existential.
The problem isn’t only price. Centralized clouds also control who gets access, set opaque pricing rules, and reserve the right to cut services overnight. They have turned compute into a scarce commodity when, paradoxically, billions of devices worldwide already have idle resources that go untapped.
This imbalance led to the rise of DePIN , Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks. Instead of a handful of corporations owning the rails of the digital economy, DePIN distributes infrastructure across communities. Anyone with spare GPUs, CPUs, bandwidth, or storage can plug in and earn, while developers gain cheaper, censorship-resistant alternatives to the cloud.
At Spheron Network, we believe in infrastructure that empowers communities, not corporations. Today, we are proud to announce our partnership with Hivello, a DePIN aggregator that makes it easy for anyone to monetize idle computing resources. Together, we will scale the supply side of the DePIN ecosystem, help more people earn, and build stronger, more resilient infrastructure for AI and Web3.
The Scale of the DePIN Opportunity
DePIN has moved quickly from a niche idea to a major market narrative. By early 2025, analysts tracked over 1,500 active projects across compute, storage, bandwidth, wireless, etc. According to CoinGecko, the combined market cap of leading DePIN tokens surpassed $19 billion in September 2025, up nearly 4x from the year before. And the World Economic Forum projects that the sector could balloon to $3.5 trillion by 2028. , making it one of the fastest-growing segments of the digital economy.
But growth on paper doesn’t always translate into practical scalability. While demand for decentralized compute is rising , particularly from AI, which is projected to consume 1 trillion liters of water annually by 2028 just to cool data centers (Morgan Stanley) , the supply side of DePIN is still under pressure. Networks struggle to onboard new users at scale, node operators often lack technical knowledge, and reward systems can feel opaque or unpredictable.
The gap is clear: without easier ways for people to contribute resources, DePIN risks becoming another good idea that fails to scale.
Why the Supply Side of DePIN Struggles
DePIN has huge promise. It can turn unused resources, your GPU, CPU, and bandwidth, into income. It can spread infrastructure more evenly, reduce dependency on big cloud providers, and bring innovations closer to users. But DePIN still faces real, measurable problems:
The challenges facing DePIN contributors are not theoretical; they are lived experiences of early adopters. Many people who want to join find themselves stuck at the first hurdle: installing node software, configuring ports, setting up wallets, and ensuring 24/7 uptime. These processes may be second nature to crypto-natives but are intimidating for the average user.
Even those who succeed face uncertainty about whether earnings justify the effort. Electricity costs eat into rewards, hardware degrades under constant load, and some projects pay inconsistently. Without transparency and predictable incentives, users churn quickly.
Then there’s the issue of distribution. Most DePIN nodes cluster in a few geographies. This leaves large parts of the world underserved, creating latency issues for applications that need low-lag inference or real-time processing. And when supply lags demand, costs stay high, defeating the very purpose of decentralization.
Hivello’s Answers Making DePIN Simple
This is where Hivello comes in. Hivello has made it its mission to make DePIN participation accessible to everyone, not just the technically skilled. Instead of requiring users to navigate a maze of dashboards and node clients, Hivello offers a single, user-friendly interface. Plug in your idle computing resources, whether CPU or GPU, and the platform does the rest.
Hivello acts as an aggregator, connecting users to multiple DePIN networks behind the scenes. For contributors, this means no need to learn the quirks of each network, no need to constantly monitor uptime, and no need to stress about integrations. For DePIN projects, it means a steady inflow of new supply that would otherwise have been locked out.
The model is already proving itself. By simplifying onboarding, Hivello reduces friction and boosts contributor retention. The more contributors it attracts, the more stable and geographically distributed the supply becomes. This, in turn, makes DePIN networks more reliable for developers, closing the loop between supply and demand.
As Hivello co-founder Domenic Carosa explained when announcing the partnership: “By partnering with Spheron, we are not only providing our users with a new, high-value earning opportunity but also validating our model by helping a major network scale its infrastructure.”
Spheron’s Role Providing Infrastructure at Scale
If Hivello solves the human side of DePIN onboarding, Spheron provides the compute backbone that turns those contributions into usable infrastructure.
Spheron is building the world’s first community-powered data center, pooling idle GPUs and CPUs from thousands of contributors worldwide. The network already supports tens of thousands of nodes, providing compute for AI training, inference, and Web3 applications. For developers, it offers cost savings of up to 80–90% compared to Hyperscalers while maintaining global distribution and censorship resistance.
For Hivello, Spheron is the natural partner. Every new user onboarded through Hivello can feed directly into Spheron’s network, expanding supply where it’s needed most. For contributors, this means a new high-value earning stream powered by real AI and Web3 workloads. For Spheron, it means scaling supply faster to meet rising demand.
What the Partnership Delivers
The Spheron x Hivello partnership is focused on practical outcomes:
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Onboarding at Scale: Hivello brings in contributors who would otherwise be locked out, lowering technical barriers and simplifying participation.
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Stronger Supply for Spheron: These contributors feed into Spheron’s decentralized GPU and CPU pool, strengthening its global infrastructure.
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Better Economics for Users: Contributors earn from real workloads; developers save on compute costs. Both sides win.
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Transparency and Trust: Together, we will deliver clear dashboards, performance metrics, and predictable earnings so users know exactly what they’re getting.
This isn’t just a partnership for press releases. It’s a blueprint for how DePIN projects can tackle their most significant challenge: scaling supply without compromising simplicity.
Looking Ahead
DePIN is no longer a buzzword. It’s an economy in motion, backed by billions in capital and thousands of projects. But to fulfill its potential, it must make participation as easy as logging into an app. That’s the gap Hivello fills, and with Spheron’s infrastructure behind it, contributors gain real earning power while developers gain a reliable supply.
The DePIN market is expected to reach $3.5 trillion within three years. The only way it gets there is if people can contribute at scale, with trust, transparency, and economic sense.
By combining Hivello’s accessible onboarding with Spheron’s decentralized compute backbone, we’re showing what that future looks like. A DePIN ecosystem powered not by corporations but by communities. A network where every idle GPU or CPU can generate income, and every developer can deploy workloads affordably and reliably.
The infra layer for DePIN is here , and it’s built by people, for people.
