How DePIN Tokens Earn and Who Pays

Introduction

Each of the four networks on this page, Helium, Filecoin, Render and Bittensor, pays its contributors in a token it creates, and each of those tokens has two forces acting on it. New tokens are issued to the people who run Hotspots, storage servers, graphics cards or machine-learning models. Customers who use the network's service pay for it, and on Helium and Render the token is burned when they do (read 3 November 2026). Which of those two forces is larger, over the same period, says more about a token's prospects than any chart of its price.

This page takes the four networks our DePIN explained guide uses as worked cases and asks the same four questions of each: what the token is paid for, who pays for the service, how the network issues new tokens, and which published figure shows demand. The networks are Helium (HNT), Filecoin (FIL), Render (RENDER) and Bittensor (TAO). Each case ends with the figure this page could read, its source and its date, or a plain statement that no such figure could be read.

The answers differ more than the shared label suggests. Render's knowledge base says rendering and AI tasks can be priced in fiat currencies, and that creators burn RENDER for Render Credits of equivalent US dollar value (read 3 November 2026). Filecoin's public data shows how much storage is committed and how much of it sits in verified deals, but its chain fees are not the same thing as payments for storage. Helium's customer payments are billed in Data Credits, and the burn figures were not readable from its own pages on the day this page was written. Bittensor's documentation describes stake swaps through subnet pools (read 4 November 2026); this page did not read a customer-payment series for those subnets.

Those differences are the reason for this page. A DePIN token can rise while its network's customers stay flat, because buyers expect the customers to arrive later, and it can fall while customers grow, because contributors sell faster than customers buy. Reading the demand figure next to the issuance figure tells you which of those stories you are looking at, and it costs nothing but the time to find two numbers.

The page ends with the exposure itself. Holding one of these tokens is a market position, and the people who earn the tokens are steady sellers of them. If you decide to hold one, an exchange that lists it is the usual route, and listings are themselves a dated fact: this page records which of the four tokens two exchanges listed on the day it was written.

Every figure carries the date it was read and its source beside it. Exchange listings were read on 3 November 2026, network documentation on 3 and 4 November 2026, and the demand and issuance figures from DefiLlama and Filfox on 4 November 2026, all with our verification client. Where a figure is our own arithmetic from those sources, the page says so and shows the inputs. None of it is a forecast, and none of it describes a token as an income you can rely on.

How to Read a DePIN Token: Two Flows

A DePIN token sits between two flows of value. One runs out of the network: new tokens issued to contributors as rewards. The other runs into it: payments from customers for coverage, storage or compute. The balance between them, measured over the same period and in the same currency, is the most useful single check a token holder can make.

The outflow: new issuance

Each network publishes how many tokens it issues and when the rate falls. Multiplying the tokens issued in a day by the token's price gives the value of new issuance for that day. It is an approximation, because some rewards vest or are locked, but it is the right order of magnitude for comparing with customer payments. Every contributor who sells rewards to cover costs turns part of that outflow into selling pressure on the market.

The inflow: customer payments

Customer payments are harder to find. Some networks route them through the token, so that customers buy and burn it, and a data provider can count the burn. Others take payment in ways that never touch the chain the token runs on. Where a network publishes no customer figure, the honest conclusion is that you cannot tell how much of its rewards customers fund, not that customers fund all of it.

What the comparison tells you

The comparison sorts networks into three rough positions, each with a different meaning for a holder:

• Customer payments close to issuance. Contributors' selling is largely met by customers' buying, and the token's price has a base in use.
• Customer payments well below issuance. The gap is funded by buyers on the market, and the token's price rests on their expectations.
• No customer figure at all. The question cannot be answered from public data, and the uncertainty is itself the finding.

None of these positions is permanent. Issuance falls on published schedules, and customer demand can grow. The comparison is a snapshot, dated like every other figure on this page, and worth repeating whenever you revisit a position.

Three Traps When Reading a Demand Figure

A demand figure is only useful if it measures what it appears to measure. Each of the four networks on this page publishes something that looks like demand and turns out, on a closer read of its own documentation, to mean something narrower. Three traps recur:

• A burn that comes back. Helium's token documentation describes re-emission against a smoothed burn target, capped at 1,643.83561643 HNT per 24-hour epoch (read 3 November 2026). Supply accounting must include burns and capped re-emissions.
• Committed is not paid. Filecoin's verified storage counts ten times towards a provider's power, and the DataCap that makes a deal verified is allocated by notaries and cannot be sold or exchanged, its documentation says (read 3 November 2026). A large verified share shows what providers have committed for block rewards, not what clients pay.
• Stake is not a customer. Bittensor's documentation says staking on a subnet is a swap of TAO for the subnet's alpha in a pool (read 4 November 2026). Money moving between pools is holders trading with each other, not a payment for a service already delivered.

A fourth trap is simpler and more common: comparing figures over different periods or in different units. A 30-day total of dollar spend and a single day's token issuance only compare once both are in the same currency over the same span. Where this page sets two figures against each other, it converts them first and says so.

None of the traps makes a figure worthless. Each tells you how to read it: a burn net of what is minted back, a verified share as a measure of incentives, stake flows as a market's opinion. Read that way, the figures still separate a network that customers are paying for from one that the market is paying for.

Helium (HNT): Data Credits and Recorded Buybacks

What HNT is paid for

HNT rewards people who run Hotspots, which provide LoRaWAN coverage for Internet of Things devices or Wi-Fi coverage for the Helium Mobile network. How those rewards are calculated has changed several times. Helium's documentation says Proof of Coverage, the radio-beacon check that once decided much of a Hotspot's reward, was removed from the Helium networks as of 6 July 2026 (read 3 November 2026). Helium Improvement Proposal 138, started on 8 November 2024 and listed as deployed in the HIP repository's index (read 4 November 2026), set out rewarding participants directly in HNT through what it calls the current Utility Score, in place of the IOT and MOBILE subnetwork tokens. Helium's documentation describes Mobile Hotspots earning rewards for eligible data transfer (read 3 November 2026).

Who pays

Helium's customers pay with Data Credits. Its documentation fixes one Data Credit at $0.00001, says Data Credits are created by burning HNT at the US dollar price reported by an on-chain Pyth price feed, and says Internet of Things data is billed in 24-byte increments (read 3 November 2026). For the Mobile network, the same page says data is charged at $0.10 per gigabyte, or 10,000 Data Credits, a rate it describes as reflecting current commercial offload rates (read 3 November 2026).

Two kinds of customer pay, then. Internet of Things users buy Data Credits to move small sensor messages, and mobile carriers and subscribers generate Wi-Fi traffic billed by the gigabyte. Helium's documentation says Data Credits are generated by burning HNT (read 3 November 2026). This mechanism does not establish when that HNT was bought on the open market.

Data Credits cannot be traded. Helium's documentation says they are not transferable once created, and that once they are delegated for data-transfer accounting they cannot be redelegated (read 3 November 2026). Data Credits pay for network usage and protocol actions, including onboarding (Helium documentation, read 3 November 2026).

The Mobile side also has business customers. Helium's documentation describes a Helium Plus programme through which owners of existing Wi-Fi networks that support Passpoint can join the Helium Mobile network and earn from enabling carrier offload (read 3 November 2026). Traffic of that kind is billed through Data Credits at the Mobile rate, so it counts towards the same burn.

How HNT is issued

Helium Improvement Proposal 20 set halvings of net HNT issuance every two years on the anniversary of the network's genesis, with the first on 1 August 2021 cutting issuance to 2.5 million HNT a month, and it puts the maximum supply at 223 million HNT. Continuing that schedule, our arithmetic from HIP 20's 2.5 million HNT a month after 1 August 2021 and its two-year halving interval (HIP 20, read 3 November 2026) gives 1.25 million HNT a month from August 2023 and 625,000 HNT a month from August 2025. Helium's token documentation describes Net Emissions, instituted in August 2021, as re-emission against a smoothed burn target capped at 1,643.83561643 HNT per 24-hour epoch; the cap is unaffected by halvings (read 3 November 2026).

Our arithmetic from that 625,000 HNT a month on HIP 20's schedule (read 3 November 2026) and HNT's price of $0.338 on DefiLlama's price API (read 3 November 2026) gives about $211,000 a month. It is not a figure Helium publishes, and it leaves out the HNT that Net Emissions mints back.

The demand figure, and why it is hard to read

A Data Credit burn figure needs a breakdown of data-transfer and protocol charges before it can describe customer usage. Helium's documentation shows a weekly Data Credit burn chart, but its figures are not in the text of Helium's page that our verification client read on 3 November 2026. The burn total is therefore not stated here.

A second series exists, with a narrower meaning. Per DefiLlama's dashboard, read 4 November 2026, its Helium series counts HNT that Helium Mobile bought on the open market and burned, funded by subscriber revenue; the series begins on 21 October 2025, totals $2,296,688, and records nothing after 31 December 2025. This page could not read a statement from Helium about the programme, so it does not say whether or why the buying stopped. DefiLlama's methodology excludes Data Credit burns from its revenue measure, citing a $0.50/GB protocol peg and roughly $0.10/GB carrier payments (read 4 November 2026); Helium's Data Credit documentation states a Mobile charge of $0.10/GB (read 3 November 2026). These reads do not resolve that rate discrepancy.

What a holder should take from it

Helium's customer payments exist and are billed through the token, which is the design working as intended. What cannot be read from public sources on this page's date is their size against issuance, and DefiLlama's series records zero buybacks after 31 December 2025 (read 4 November 2026). A holder who wants the comparison should look for Helium's own published burn figures, with their dates, before relying on the token's price. HIP 20's maximum of 223 million HNT and its halving schedule put a ceiling on the issuance side of the comparison; the customer side has no such ceiling, in either direction.

Filecoin (FIL): Storage, Collateral and Verified Deals

What FIL is paid for

FIL rewards storage providers who commit storage to the network and prove, every day, that they still hold the data. Filecoin's documentation says each sector of 32 GiB or 64 GiB is verified once in every 24-hour period, and that a provider must answer each challenge with a zk-SNARK proof within a 30-minute deadline (read 3 November 2026). Filecoin's documentation says providers earn block rewards when elected to produce blocks, with at least 10 TiB of storage power required for eligibility (read 3 November 2026).

Who pays

Clients can pay storage providers through storage deals: Filecoin's documentation advises providers to charge for most client deals, although some programmes may require them to accept deals for free (read 4 November 2026). A second channel, Filecoin Plus, changes what providers earn more than what clients pay. Filecoin's documentation says notaries allocate DataCap to clients with valuable storage use cases, that DataCap cannot be sold or exchanged, and that storage in verified deals receives a 10x quality adjustment multiplier at the protocol level, making a provider more likely to win block rewards (read 3 November 2026).

That design means part of a provider's income comes from protocol rewards steered towards verified data, rather than directly from the client. A verified deal can be worth storing even at a low price, because the block rewards it attracts are paid in new FIL.

What a storage provider locks and risks

Filecoin's documentation lists three collateral mechanisms: initial pledge collateral, a commitment of FIL with each sector; block rewards as collateral, which vest over time; and storage deal provider collateral, which aligns a provider's incentives with its client's (read 3 November 2026). Penalties run alongside them. The slashing documentation describes fault fees while a sector is offline, a sector penalty once a fault is detected, termination fees when a sector is removed from the network, and consensus fault slashing for providers that act maliciously; for providers with a history of acting honestly, it lists exceptions, including no penalty in the current proving period after a missed proof and no fees if the sector is recovered in a later proving period (read 3 November 2026).

Filecoin's own guide to a provider's return on investment lists the inputs a provider has to weigh (read 3 November 2026):

• The hardware and the FIL collateral, which it says will likely need outside financing.
• Block rewards, which it says are subject to the volatility of the FIL price.
• The cost of sales, such as acquiring customers and marketing.
• The total cost of ownership, including backups, data ingest and retrieval, and data preparation.
• The growth of the network and of demand for storage, which it says can raise or lower the return.

For a FIL holder, the list explains the selling. Providers carry costs in ordinary money and collateral in FIL, so a fall in FIL's price squeezes them from both sides at once.

How FIL is issued

Filecoin's documentation says no more than 2 billion FIL will ever exist, and describes two minting tracks: baseline minting of up to 770 million FIL as the network reaches performance milestones, and simple minting of 330 million FIL on a six-year half-life (read 3 November 2026). Filfox, a Filecoin block explorer, reported 52,843 FIL mined in the previous day when read at 05:49 UTC on 4 November 2026, at a price of $0.858. Our arithmetic from those two Filfox figures, 52,843 FIL at $0.858 (read 4 November 2026), puts that day's new issuance at about $45,300. Filfox lists about 926.6 million FIL in circulation and about 43.1 million FIL burnt (read 4 November 2026). Filecoin's documentation sets a 2 billion FIL cap (read 3 November 2026).

The demand figures

Filfox's overview, read at the same time, gives the network's committed storage. Filfox lists raw byte power of about 1.13 EiB and quality-adjusted power of about 10.73 EiB, with 436 active miners and about 57.7 million FIL pledged as collateral (read 4 November 2026). Because verified deals count ten times, the ratio of the two power figures shows how much storage sits in verified deals. Our arithmetic from Filfox's two power figures (read 4 November 2026) and the 10x multiplier in Filecoin's documentation (read 3 November 2026) puts it at about 94% of raw storage.

The share describes what providers have committed and verified, not what clients pay. Per DefiLlama's dashboard, read 4 November 2026, its Filecoin series counts fees paid on the chain itself, which totalled $119,832 over the previous 30 days, about $4,000 a day by our arithmetic; those are transaction fees, not payments for storage deals, which this page could not read. Set against about $45,300 of new FIL a day, the chain fees are small, and the storage payments that would complete the comparison are not public in a form this page could read.

What a holder should take from it

Filecoin's committed storage is large and mostly verified, which shows that the reward design works as an incentive. It does not show customers paying for that storage at a scale that matches new issuance. The collateral matters too: about 57.7 million FIL locked by providers, according to Filfox's 4 November read, is FIL that cannot be sold while it is pledged, and becomes sellable as providers exit.

Render (RENDER): Fiat Pricing and Render Credits

What RENDER is paid for

RENDER rewards operators who contribute graphics processors to rendering and AI jobs. Render's knowledge base says emissions are allocated epoch by epoch, typically over a week, based on network usage, and that epoch durations can be changed by a governance vote (read 3 November 2026). RNP-013, created on 15 April 2024 and marked implemented, rebalanced the first year's emissions without changing their total (read 4 November 2026). RNP-015, created on 6 May 2024 and marked implemented, specifies availability rewards for uptime (read 4 November 2026).

Who pays

Render's knowledge base says rendering and AI tasks can be priced in fiat currencies, and that creators burn RENDER for Render Credits of equivalent US dollar value (read 3 November 2026).

The demand figure

DefiLlama does exactly that. Its methodology describes gross user-paid job spend, derived by dividing the observed RENDER burn value by 0.95; the burn represents 95% of gross spend, and a 5% OTOY service fee is off-chain (read 4 November 2026). Read on 4 November 2026, it recorded $800,614 over the previous 30 days and $5,249 on the latest day, and $3,949,094 since the series began on 3 June 2025.

DefiLlama's methodology derives gross job spend from the observed Solana burn and an off-chain service-fee allocation (read 4 November 2026). The series does not deduct RENDER emissions to operators. The day-to-day series is uneven, from $1,798 on 31 October 2026 to $27,521 on 29 October 2026, which is why a 30-day total says more than any single day.

This page did not read the size of Render's current weekly emissions, so it does not set the burn against issuance. The figure that is available is still the cleanest customer measure of the four networks here, and a holder can complete the comparison by reading the emission schedule in Render's current governance proposals.

How Render changed its token and its emissions

Render's knowledge base presents the Burn Mint Equilibrium as a way to price services consistently through supply and demand, so that creators can forecast the cost of rendering and AI jobs (read 3 November 2026). Moving to it meant moving the token. RNP-006, created on 2 November 2023 and read on 4 November 2026, says holders can upgrade RNDR to RENDER whenever they choose. It allocates up to 1.14 million RNDR over the first year for Ethereum transfer subsidies and provides for an assistant to pay gas for one transfer per eligible wallet for three months, with holders paying gas after that period.

The emissions have been adjusted since. RNP-013 says the total of network emissions stayed unchanged, while some underused emissions moved to a new pool for AI dataset generation and customer acquisition, with a longer release structure and a slower release of network emissions. RNP-015 set out availability rewards for operators, and Render's knowledge base names RNP-018 as the source of the Year 2 emissions schedule (read 3 November 2026). For a holder, the point is procedural: Render's issuance is set by governance proposals, and each one is worth reading when it passes.

What a holder should take from it

Render's knowledge base describes fiat pricing and RENDER emissions to operators (read 3 November 2026). The fiat value of an operator's token reward depends on its token amount and the price at which it is valued or sold. Render moved its token to Solana under RNP-006, created on 2 November 2023, which says holders can upgrade RNDR to RENDER whenever they choose; RENDER's price was $1.48 on 3 November 2026, per DefiLlama's price API.

Bittensor (TAO): Stake Instead of Invoices

What TAO is paid for

Bittensor's documentation describes independent subnets whose miners produce the work each mechanism demands and whose validators score that work (read 3 November 2026). It distinguishes TAO injected into subnet pools from participant-side alpha rewards (read 3 November 2026). New subnets' alpha weights are 18% for the owner, 41% for the validator bucket and 41% for miners, with root stakers paid first from the validator bucket; owners can change weights within chain-enforced bounds (read 3 November 2026).

The split matters to anyone weighing a subnet. Bittensor's emission-weights documentation describes a five-slot alpha vector covering burn, recycle, owner, validator and miner, and a global TAO weight of 0.18 on mainnet (read 3 November 2026). A miner's share of a subnet's emission is therefore a parameter its owner controls, not a fixed property of the work.

Who pays

This page did not read a customer-payment series for Bittensor's subnets. Since the dTAO upgrade, shipped in the subtensor release v2.0.0 on 13 February 2025, each subnet has its own token, called alpha, and a pool that holds TAO and alpha. Bittensor's documentation says staking on a subnet is not a deposit but a swap: staking sells TAO into the pool for alpha, and unstaking sells alpha back for TAO (read 4 November 2026). The dTAO whitepaper says subnet token prices guide the emission process.

Stake moving between pools is the force that steers where new TAO goes. It is a market judgement by holders about each subnet's future, not a payment for a service already delivered, and that is the main difference between Bittensor and the other three networks.

The root network and the pools

TAO can also be staked without choosing a subnet. Bittensor's documentation describes netuid 0 as the root network, which has no miners, no alpha token and no validation work: it is the pool where TAO is staked directly, and root stake counts toward validator stake weight on every subnet and earns a share of each subnet's dividends (read 3 November 2026). Bittensor's staking-pools documentation describes price impact, swap fees and MEV-shielded submission for subnet swaps (read 4 November 2026).

The dTAO whitepaper adds a point about timing. It says that, because token supply growth tapers, subnets that launch sooner benefit from periods of faster liquidity growth in their pools, while later subnets must accept slower growth. Underneath the subnets, Bittensor's documentation on chain consensus says a permissioned set of validator authorities produces and finalises blocks, a mechanism it classifies as Proof of Authority (read 3 November 2026).

How TAO is issued

Bittensor's documentation says the base emission is 1 TAO per block, with one block every 12 seconds, decaying toward a hard cap of 21 million TAO, and that emission halves each time total issuance crosses the midpoint of the remaining supply, first at 10.5 million TAO (read 3 November 2026). The documentation's mainnet snapshot, fetched on 11 August, shows total issuance of 11,222,524.60 TAO, past that first threshold; our arithmetic from that snapshot and the documented 21 million cap (both read 3 November 2026) puts issuance at about 53% of the cap.

On those figures, emission is 0.5 TAO a block; our arithmetic from that rate and the documented 12-second block time (read 3 November 2026) gives 3,600 TAO a day across 7,200 blocks. At $220.19 on DefiLlama's price API (read 3 November 2026), our arithmetic puts that at about $792,700 of new TAO a day. This page did not read a customer-payment series to set against that issuance.

What a holder should take from it

Bittensor's documentation describes two choices for a TAO holder: hold TAO, or swap it into a subnet's pool (read 4 November 2026). The second is a trade with a price on both sides, and the documentation's own word for it is a swap. What you get back depends on the pool's price when you leave, so a staked position can return less TAO than went in. How staking works on other networks is set out in our crypto staking guide, and the difference is the point: subnet staking carries price risk inside the stake itself.

The Four Tokens Side by Side

The table gathers the four cases. Each cell names its source, and the caption gives the read date that applies unless a cell gives another; a cell marked not read means this page found no primary figure on that date.

A worked example: Filecoin's two flows

The comparison takes four steps, shown here with Filecoin's figures because both halves of a partial comparison are public:

• Issuance in tokens. Filfox reported 52,843 FIL mined in the previous day, read at 05:49 UTC on 4 November 2026.
• Issuance in dollars. At Filfox's price of $0.858 in the same read, that is about $45,300 for the day.
• Payments on the same basis. Per DefiLlama's dashboard, read 4 November 2026, Filecoin's chain fees were $119,832 over 30 days, which our arithmetic puts at about $4,000 a day.
• The gap, with its limits. Issuance is roughly eleven times the chain fees, but chain fees leave out payments for storage deals, which this page could not read, so the storage-payment contribution cannot be calculated from these reads.

The arithmetic is ours, from the two sources named. The inputs cover new issuance and chain fees. Payments for storage deals were not read, so these inputs do not establish the share of rewards funded by storage customers.

Read across the rows, the table says three different things. Render has a clear customer figure and no issuance figure in this page's reads; Filecoin has a clear issuance figure and no storage-payment figure; Helium has an issuance schedule and a buyback series with zero recorded after 31 December 2025 (DefiLlama, read 4 November 2026); Bittensor has an issuance figure and no customer-payment series read here. No network on this page offers both halves of the comparison from one public source on one date.

That gap is itself useful. It tells you which question to ask of each project before buying its token, and which answer, if a project gives one, would most change your view. The DePIN explained guide sets these networks' rule changes on a dated record, which is the other half of the picture. For Helium, Filecoin and Render, our Helium vs Filecoin vs Render comparison adds the supply rules, the hardware routes and the record on the same dated basis.

What Moves the Balance

The balance between issuance and customer payments is not fixed. Three things move it, and each can be watched from public sources.

Issuance follows network-specific rules

The documented issuance rules include calendar halvings, issuance thresholds and governance allocations (read 3 and 4 November 2026). Helium, for example, halves net issuance every two years on its 1 August anniversary under HIP 20. Filecoin's simple minting follows a six-year half-life, with 97% of those tokens projected to be released over about 30 years, according to its documentation (read 3 November 2026). Bittensor halves emission each time issuance crosses the midpoint of the remaining supply. Render sets its emissions through governance proposals. A falling issuance rate narrows the gap with customer payments even if customers do not grow, which is one reason the comparison is worth repeating.

Customer prices are set in dollars

Helium and Render document fiat-denominated billing units (read 3 November 2026). Helium fixes a Data Credit at $0.00001 and charges $0.10 per gigabyte on Mobile, a rate its documentation says reflects current commercial offload rates (read 3 November 2026). Render's knowledge base says rendering and AI tasks can be priced in fiat currencies and describes Render Credits of equivalent US dollar value (read 3 November 2026). When the token's price falls, customers keep paying the same dollar amounts, but those dollars buy and burn more tokens, so the burn in tokens rises while the burn in dollars stays where it was.

Contributors share a fixed pool

When total issuance is fixed, a contributor's reward depends on its share of the work or weight used to allocate that issuance. Filfox listed 436 active miners on Filecoin when read on 4 November 2026. An active-provider count alone does not establish each provider's reward, because allocation also depends on storage power and the protocol's rules (Filecoin documentation, read 3 November 2026). For a hardware buyer this is the competition term in any payback estimate, and for a token holder it is a reason the number of contributors says little about demand. Our DePIN hardware economics guide works that term into a payback estimate alongside the other costs of running a device.

Holding the Token: Risks and Routes

The risks that come with the token

Holding a DePIN token concentrates four risks in one position:

• Price risk. HNT traded at $29.11 on 1 November 2021 and at $0.338 on 3 November 2026, according to DefiLlama's price API; a token can fall a long way and stay there.
• Seller pressure. Contributors who pay costs in ordinary money sell part of what they earn, every day the network runs.
• Rule changes. Helium, Render and Bittensor have each rewritten their reward rules or moved their token since 2023, as their documentation and proposals record.
• Concentration. A position in one small-network token is not diversified, whatever the network's story.

The table shows how far the four tokens' prices have moved, from DefiLlama's price API. The two earlier dates are the ones the DePIN explained guide uses: 1 November 2021, five years before this page's reads, and 18 April 2023, the day Helium completed its move to Solana.

Cells marked not read were not requested from the API, so the table makes no claim about them. The filled cells are dated price observations; they do not establish the price path between those dates.

How much of a portfolio to put in any one volatile token is a sizing question, which our risk management guide takes up. Tokens received as rewards, and tokens sold later, can also have tax consequences; our crypto tax guide covers the UK treatment of cryptoassets.

Questions to put to a project before holding its token

The four cases turn into five questions, each answerable from a project's own publications:

• Where is your customer figure published, and over what period and in what currency?
• How many new tokens did you issue over the same period?
• How much of the supply is locked, as Filecoin providers' collateral is, and when can it be sold?
• Has your reward formula changed in the last two years, and through what process?
• Has your token moved chain, and what did holders have to do when it did?

A project that answers all five with dated figures is easier to judge than one that answers none, whatever the answers are.

Where the tokens are listed

Exchange listings are a dated fact, not a standing one. On 3 November 2026, OKX's public spot-instrument list showed FIL, RENDER and TAO markets but no HNT market, and Kraken's public asset-pair list showed markets for all four tokens. Neither list shows which markets are open to a reader in a particular country, which depends on the exchange entity that serves that country.

If you want exposure through the token rather than the hardware, an exchange that lists it is the usual route; OKX lists 3 of the four networks compared here (read 3 November 2026). Our OKX referral link page covers opening an account there.

Holding the token yourself

HNT and RENDER are Solana tokens, so holding them outside an exchange means a wallet that supports Solana; our comparison of non-custodial wallets covers the main options, and our Solana guide explains the chain itself. FIL runs on Filecoin's own chain, and TAO on Bittensor's, each with its own wallets. Whichever you choose, the token's risks travel with it.

Conclusion

A DePIN token is paid out to the people who supply a network's resource and sold by many of them, because their costs are in ordinary money. What holds its value up, over time, is customers paying for the service. The figure to read before buying one is therefore the network's demand, set against its issuance over the same period.

The four networks on this page answer that question unevenly. Render publishes the clearest customer figure: $800,614 of user-paid job spend over the previous 30 days, per DefiLlama's dashboard, read 4 November 2026. Filecoin shows large committed storage, about 94% of it in verified deals by our arithmetic from Filfox's 4 November figures and its documented 10x multiplier, and about $45,300 of new FIL a day by our arithmetic from Filfox's issuance and price, but its storage payments were not readable. Helium bills customers through Data Credits, yet its burn figures were not readable from its own pages, and DefiLlama's series of subscriber-funded HNT buybacks has recorded nothing since 31 December 2025. Bittensor issues about 3,600 TAO a day, by our arithmetic from its documented emission rule and 11 August snapshot, and this page did not read a customer-payment series for its subnets.

None of this says which token will rise or fall. It says which question each project has not yet answered in public, and that is the question to put to it before you hold its token. A project that can show customer payments approaching its issuance has a different token from one that cannot, whatever their prices are doing on the day you look.

Repeat the check whenever you revisit a position. Issuance falls on published schedules, customers can arrive or leave, and every figure here carries a date for that reason. If you hold any of these tokens, keep the dated figures you relied on, so that the next comparison has something to compare with.

The figures will move, and the method will not. Find the network's customer figure, find its issuance over the same period, put both in the same currency, and note what each figure leaves out. Four steps, two sources and a date are enough to tell a network that customers are paying for from one that the market is.

Sources

Exchange listings, prices and the Helium, Filecoin, Render and Bittensor documentation used here were read on 3 November 2026; the HIP index, Render proposals, Bittensor staking page, fee dashboards and Filfox on 4 November 2026, all with our verification client. Each entry names the document and what it supports on this page.

• OKX, public spot-instrument API, read 3 November 2026 — FIL, RENDER and TAO markets listed, no HNT market. okx.com
• Kraken, public asset-pairs API, read 3 November 2026 — markets for all four tokens. kraken.com
• Helium Documentation, Data Credit — $0.00001 per credit, the Pyth price feed, 24-byte IoT billing and the Mobile rate of $0.10 per gigabyte. docs.helium.com
• Helium Documentation, The Helium Network Token and Helium Oracle Data — Net Emissions and the removal of Proof of Coverage as of 6 July 2026. docs.helium.com
• Helium Improvement Proposals 20 and 138 — the halving schedule and maximum supply, and the return to rewarding in HNT. github.com
• DefiLlama, Helium Network fees series and methodology, read 4 November 2026 — the Mobile-funded HNT buybacks it records. api.llama.fi
• Filecoin Docs, Crypto-economics, Storage proving and Verified deals — minting, Proof-of-Spacetime, the 10 TiB threshold, DataCap and the 10x multiplier. docs.filecoin.io
• Filfox, Filecoin network overview API, read at 05:49 UTC on 4 November 2026 — raw and quality-adjusted power, active miners, FIL mined in a day, pledged collateral and price. filfox.info
• DefiLlama, fees overview, read 4 November 2026 — Filecoin's chain fees over 30 days. api.llama.fi
• Render Network Knowledge Base, Burn Mint Equilibrium and The RENDER SPL Token — dollar-valued Render Credits and emissions by epoch. know.rendernetwork.com
• Render Network Proposals RNP-006, RNP-013 and RNP-015 — the Solana upgrade, the first-year emissions rebalancing and availability rewards. github.com
• DefiLlama, Render Network BME fees series and methodology, read 4 November 2026 — user-paid job spend over 30 days and since 3 June 2025. api.llama.fi
• Bittensor Docs, Emissions, The network and Staking and pools — the emission schedule and mainnet snapshot, subnets and validators, and staking as a swap. bittensor.com
• DefiLlama, price API, read 3 November 2026 — HNT, RENDER and TAO prices, and HNT's price on 1 November 2021. coins.llama.fi
• Helium Oracle Data, read 3 November 2026 — docs.helium.com.
• Helium HIP 138, read 3 November 2026 — github.com.
• Helium HIP index, read 4 November 2026 — github.com.
• Filecoin Crypto-economics, read 3 November 2026 — docs.filecoin.io.
• Filecoin Storage proving, read 3 November 2026 — docs.filecoin.io.
• Filecoin FIL collateral, read 3 November 2026 — docs.filecoin.io.
• Filecoin Block rewards, read 3 November 2026 — docs.filecoin.io.
• Filecoin Slashing, read 3 November 2026 — docs.filecoin.io.
• Filecoin Return-on-investment, read 3 November 2026 — docs.filecoin.io.
• Filecoin Charging for data, read 4 November 2026 — docs.filecoin.io.
• The RENDER SPL Token, read 3 November 2026 — know.rendernetwork.com.
• Render RNP-006, read 4 November 2026 — github.com.
• Render RNP-015, read 4 November 2026 — github.com.
• Bittensor Emissions, read 3 November 2026 — bittensor.com.
• Bittensor Emission weights, read 3 November 2026 — bittensor.com.
• Bittensor The network, read 3 November 2026 — bittensor.com.
• Bittensor Chain consensus, read 3 November 2026 — bittensor.com.
• Bittensor dTAO whitepaper, read 3 November 2026 — bittensor.com.
• DefiLlama historical HNT and FIL prices, read 3 November 2026 — coins.llama.fi.
• DefiLlama historical HNT and RENDER prices, read 3 November 2026 — coins.llama.fi.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is earning DePIN tokens the same as mining?

Not in the Bitcoin sense, because each network checks a different kind of work. Filecoin checks storage with Proof-of-Spacetime, verifying each sector once in every 24-hour period, according to its documentation (read 3 November 2026). Bittensor's validators score miners' work by setting weights. Render rewards GPU work from a log of jobs at the end of each epoch. Helium checked radio coverage with beacons and witnesses until, its documentation says, Proof of Coverage was removed as of 6 July 2026.

Who pays for a DePIN network's service?

Customers who use the resource. Helium's documentation fixes Data Credits at $0.00001 each, Filecoin describes client storage deals, and Render describes fiat pricing and burning RENDER for Render Credits of equivalent US dollar value (read 3 November 2026). On Bittensor, the money that steers rewards is stake that holders swap into subnet pools rather than a customer invoice. The page sets each network's customer figure, where one could be read, against the value of new tokens it issues.

What is the best single number to check before buying a DePIN token?

The network's own demand figure set against the value of the tokens it issues over the same period. On 4 November 2026, DefiLlama recorded $800,614 of user-paid spend on Render jobs over the previous 30 days, and Filfox showed Filecoin minting 52,843 FIL in a day. Where customer payments are small next to new issuance, the token's price depends on new buyers rather than on use. No single number settles it, but this comparison is the one a price chart cannot show.

Why do DePIN token holders face selling pressure?

Because the people who earn the tokens pay their costs in ordinary money. A Hotspot owner, a storage provider or a GPU operator pays for hardware, power and connection in pounds or dollars, and receives rewards in the network's token, so they may sell part of what they earn to cover those costs. That selling is built into the model, and only customer demand, or buyers who expect it, absorbs it.

Is staking TAO in a Bittensor subnet like a savings deposit?

No. Bittensor's documentation says staking on a subnet is not a deposit but a swap: every subnet has a liquidity pool holding TAO and the subnet's alpha token, staking sells TAO into that pool for alpha, and unstaking sells alpha back for TAO (read 4 November 2026). What you get back depends on the pool's price when you leave, so the position can be worth less TAO than you put in.

Which exchanges list HNT, FIL, RENDER and TAO?

Listings change, so this is a dated fact rather than a standing one. On 3 November 2026, OKX's public spot-instrument list showed FIL, RENDER and TAO but not HNT, and Kraken's public asset-pair list showed all four. Whether a listed market is open to you depends on the entity that serves your country, which these lists do not show.

What does DefiLlama's Helium series record?

Per DefiLlama's dashboard, read 4 November 2026, the series counts HNT that Helium Mobile bought on the open market and burned, funded by subscriber revenue. It runs from 21 October 2025, totals $2,296,688, and records nothing after 31 December 2025. This page could not read a statement from Helium about the programme, so it does not say whether or why the buying stopped; Helium's own figures for Data Credits burned would be the fuller demand measure.

How much TAO is issued each day?

Bittensor's documentation says the base emission is 1 TAO per 12-second block and halves each time total issuance crosses a threshold, the first at 10.5 million TAO (read 3 November 2026). Its mainnet snapshot, fetched on 11 August, shows total issuance of 11,222,524.60 TAO, past that threshold. On those figures emission is 0.5 TAO a block, or 3,600 TAO a day across 7,200 blocks; at $220.19, DefiLlama's price on 3 November 2026, that is about $792,700 of new TAO a day.

Financial Disclaimer

This content is not financial advice. All information provided is for educational purposes only. Cryptocurrency investments carry significant investment risk, and past performance does not guarantee future results. Always do your own research and consult a qualified financial adviser before making investment decisions.