About the editor: Spencer Noon is an independent crypto investor & onchain analyst.

• There are 60M km of roads in the world. To map these roads, Google pays workers to drive around in $500k mapping vehicles. And yet, billions of people drive those exact same roads every day. Why can’t they do the mapping? Hivemapper, a decentralized network that uses AI to transform dashcam imagery into a fresh global map, sees dePIN as a better way. Over the past 6mo, contributors have submitted more than 20M km of map data, including more than 3M unique km, equivalent to 5% of global roads.

• Onchain transaction data shows Hivemapper has more than 10,000 weekly active contributors. Most are doing microtasks to train the Map AI, and about 3,000 weekly active contributors are using dashcams to submit imagery, up 10x since the start of 2023.

• Map contributors’ mean reward last week was 1,385 HONEY. (P25 = 223, P50 = 789, P75 = 1,861). Rewards have been stable, not diminishing with network growth, because they are based on a Map Progress formula and not a fixed weekly mint.

• DIMO is an open connected vehicle platform allowing drivers to monetize the data from their vehicles. 14,633 vehicles are now minted onchain and connected to the network (a 4.7x increase since the project was last featured in ON #144), traveling a combined 1.77 million miles in the past week (source). DIMO owners also now average 2.68 connected vehicles, a notable increase from 1.37 vehicles at the start of the year. This suggests DIMO’s customer base is now expanding into a new segment: fleet owners.

• Because DIMO is a two-sided marketplace between users and ecosystem partners, rewards payouts are a key KPI that we can observe onchain (example). These transactions indicate partners spending money to acquire data and users. Over the past 3 months, 48,718 DIMO has been paid out to users as rewards.

• When a car is minted on DIMO, the make of the car is one of the pieces published onchain. The resulting data provides great indicators about how easy it is to interface with that car’s data as well as which car makers are building better software and more open cars. The top brands on DIMO today are Tesla (~3,300 connected vehicles) and BMW (~2,200 vehicles).

• Filecoin is the largest decentralized storage network. The team recently launched the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) which brings smart contracts to Filecoin. The FVM enables developers to build new use cases on top of the Filecoin network including data access control, data DAOs, perpetual storage, and collateral leasing. According to Starboard, ~2,300 FVM contracts have been deployed to date holding an aggregate balance of ~2 million FIL.

• The market for Filecoin liquid staking providers has been growing quickly. These platforms allow users to lend their FIL to Filecoin miners, with loans secured by on-chain collateral. These platforms then generally issue a liquid staking token (analogous to stETH) back to users.

• The data stored on Filecoin has grown from 500PiB at the beginning of the year to 1100 PiB today. The network has been onboarding 4-5K TiB of data daily. This is at least partially driven by Filecoin Plus, which subsidizes ‘useful storage’ with $FIL block rewards.

• Render is a distributed marketplace for GPU-intensive rendering jobs. The network matches GPU requesters looking for affordable rendering power with GPU providers that have excess capacity. Payments to GPU providers are up 214% Q/Q and 151% Y/Y as artists and other creators spend more on rendering jobs. (Note that OTOY's payments to GPU providers are often delayed significantly, so spikes might reflect 'catch up' payments from prior months.)

• The number of unique Render node operators receiving payments is roughly constant, which reflects the fact that OTOY artificially limits supply. There is somewhere between the equivalent of 2530 x GTX1080s & 757 RTX 4090's in compute performance active on the RNDR network for Artists to utilize.

• Finally, while the number of frames rendered is down slightly quarter-over-quarter (-2.88%) and year-over-year (-21.49%), the network has seen a ~2x increase in frames rendered since Q1 2021.