Spent the weekend mapping out how decentralized infrastructure actually layers together. The narrative is clearer now than it was 12 months ago.
$GRT - The Query Layer
Graph isn’t just “blockchain Google.” It’s solving the data availability problem that kills most dApp UX. Every time you load a DeFi dashboard or NFT marketplace, someone needs to index and serve blockchain data instantly. Centralized solutions are fast but defeat the purpose. Graph proved you could decentralize indexing and keep it performant.
$PHA - Confidential Compute Infrastructure
Phala Network is tackling something most people miss: privacy in execution. You can have decentralized compute, but if everything runs in plaintext, you can’t process sensitive data, run private AI models, or handle anything requiring confidentiality.
TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) integration is the breakthrough here. Workers can execute code without seeing the data. That’s not just theoretical it enables actual enterprise use cases: private DeFi strategies, confidential AI inference, secure multi-party computation.
$BTTC - The Bandwidth Economy
BitTorrent Token is older thinking but still relevant. It monetized something that was free (seeding files) and added incentives to a protocol that already worked. Not revolutionary, but it showed that existing P2P networks could be financialized without breaking them.
$FLT(
@Fluence )- Compute as the Missing Primitive
Here’s where it gets interesting. Storage is solved (Filecoin, Arweave). Data indexing is solved (Graph). Bandwidth has options. But execution? That’s still centralized.
Fluence is attacking the hardest problem: running arbitrary code in a trustless, peer-to-peer way. Not just smart contracts on-chain (too expensive, too slow), but actual application logic APIs, AI inference, real-time processing.
The technical challenge is brutal. You need:
• Verifiable computation (can’t trust random nodes)
• Economic incentives (nodes need to get paid fairly)
• Low latency (users won’t wait 30 seconds for serverless functions)
• Composability (developers need to build on it easily)
Why this matters: AI agents are the killer app. If autonomous agents are going to interact with DeFi, manage treasuries, or coordinate with each other, they can’t run on OpenAI’s servers or AWS Lambda. They need sovereign compute that nobody can shut down.
Fluences cloudless model means applications can truly be unstoppable. Not just censorship resistant, but operationally independent. That’s the next frontier.
My bet:
decentralized compute unlocks everything else especially once AI models need to run trustlessly.
Curious what others are tracking in this space.
#DePIN