India’s Smart Cities Mission concluded in March 2025 after a decade that saw ₹1.6 lakh crore spent on more than 8,000 projects across 100 cities. It was an important beginning, but only that. The larger challenge now lies ahead. By 2030, nearly 600 million Indians are expected to live in urban areas, with another 400 million projected to be added over the following two decades. The Urban Challenge Fund, notified in April 2026, has already signalled where policy attention must shift: towards Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities and towards projects capable of sustaining themselves financially. The Centre alone cannot carry a challenge of this magnitude, and policymakers are increasingly searching for new models to build and operate public infrastructure.
One answer has been taking shape in the virtual digital asset world. It is called DePIN (Decentralised Physical Infrastructure Networks). The easiest way to understand the idea is through one of its earliest and best-known examples — Filecoin.
Today, most people rely on companies such as Google or Amazon to store photos, emails, and files on their servers. Filecoin turns that model on its head. A small firm in Pune with spare room on its hard drive can plug into the Filecoin network and offer that space to users anywhere in the world. Every file stored on its drive is logged on a shared digital ledger, and every few hours the firm must prove that the file remains safely stored. If it does, it earns FIL — Filecoin’s native digital token. If it loses the data, part of the deposit it had to put down gets docked.
On the other side are clients — universities, media companies, and government archives — who pay in FIL to store their data, often at prices well below those charged by large cloud providers. The Pune-based firm can then sell the FIL it earns on crypto exchanges where the token is actively traded and convert the proceeds into rupees. No middleman, no central cloud — just software matching those with spare capacity to those who need it.
The research firm that coined the term DePIN describes it as networks that use crypto-based rewards to build and run real-world infrastructure through public participation rather than through a single company. Put simply, instead of one firm owning all the hard drives, hotspots, or sensors, thousands of ordinary people contribute hardware from their homes, shops, or rooftops, while blockchain technology maintains a tamper-proof record of who supplied what. Contributors are rewarded in tokens — a form of digital money that can later be sold on crypto exchanges for rupees or dollars.
The sector’s market size was valued at more than $50 billion in 2024, and the World Economic Forum expects it to grow to $3.5 trillion by 2028.
That same pattern runs across some of the biggest DePIN networks in operation today. Helium has more than 400,000 community-run wireless hotspots across 80 countries and serves over a million daily 5G users. In San José, California, the network is used to run parking, water, and air-quality sensors at roughly one dollar per sensor annually. Hivemapper, a crypto-backed alternative to Google Maps, has mapped hundreds of millions of kilometres using dashcams fitted to ordinary cars.
India, too, has entered the space. Wifi Dabba, backed by Y Combinator and Multicoin Capital, pays the country’s 1.5 lakh Local Cable Operators in tokens to run hotspots and has already deployed close to 14,000 of them, aimed at the 44 per cent of Indians without reliable internet access. More than 800 community-owned WeatherXM stations now operate on that network, sending area-level rainfall and temperature data to farmers, schools, and insurers.
The usefulness of such systems for India’s next 500 cities is easy to see. Indore’s IoT-enabled bins have already reduced waste-collection trips by roughly one-third. Similar systems could work in cities such as Jhansi or Warangal without depending entirely on central government funding, with shopkeepers hosting sensors in exchange for tokens. Rooftop solar systems under PM Surya Ghar, layered with a DePIN network, could allow households to sell surplus electricity to neighbours in near real time. Likewise, a mesh of community-owned flood sensors could warn parts of Mumbai ahead of the next monsoon rather than after it.
However, there are real constraints like DoT spectrum rules, BIS hardware certification requirements, and token-price volatility among them. Yet India remains better placed than many countries to experiment with such systems. Forty-nine exchanges are now registered with FIU-IND under the PMLA, and the compliance architecture the sector has built — including KYC norms, the Travel Rule, and Suspicious Transaction Reports (STRs) — is precisely the kind of framework a municipal body or discom would require before engaging with a token-based operator.
India reimagined payments through UPI and identity through Aadhaar. Rewiring how the next 500 cities are metered and monitored may well be the next logical step, and with the right regulatory scaffolding, the crypto sector could play a meaningful role. DePIN will not replace the state. But for the cities still to come, it may prove to be the multiplier that finally makes the numbers add up.