When Mitch and Jieyi launched Theta in 2018, the original business plan presented to the company’s early investors drew an analogy of “Theta as a sharing economy” to the likes of Uber and Airbnb. In the same way that Uber was about private car sharing, Airbnb was about monetizing one’s home, Theta was about sharing and monetizing excess bandwidth that users already have. This physical resource, namely the user’s existing computer CPU, GPU and internet bandwidth, was in fact the definition of a physical infrastructure. The fact that the users were globally distributed meant these resources and the network itself were highly decentralized.
Today, decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), has emerged as a narrative to capture what the Theta team originally described as the “resource sharing economy”. A recent Forbes article described the “DePIN concept resembles the value cloud companies offer, allowing entrepreneurs to start their businesses without needing any hardware or infrastructure. Some of today’s giants, such as Uber and Airbnb, have benefited from the same business model.” The Economic Times says, “the DePIN sector is becoming one of the hottest trending categories in the crypto market, and offers a new approach to creating and maintaining a physical infrastructure through a community of deployers rather than trusting a centralized entity.”
While the Theta edge network was initially focused on the video pipeline including GPU-intensive video encoding, transcoding and bandwidth-intensive video delivery, starting in 2022 the team recognized that this GPU processing power in excess of 80 PetaFLOPS can be utilized for AI inference, training and other GenAI applications. Theta’s early vision of edge computing with edge devices is captured in the slide below from the same 2018 investor deck. The “Edge cacher” concept and vision is now the Theta EdgeCloud platform slated to launch on May 1st.
In early 2023 Messari, one of leading providers of crypto market intelligence, introduced the DePIN sector map placing Theta in the “CDN networks” and “specific purpose compute” categories. With the launch of EdgeCloud, Theta will be more accurately placed in the “general purpose compute” category supporting video, AI, complex scientific simulation, financial modeling and many other compute-intensive tasks.
In summary, the entire Theta team is excited to be part of the DePIN, AI and GPU infrastructure sectors and looking forward to expanding the EdgeCloud platform over the course of 2024–2025. In the meantime, Theta is already part of the DePIN categories on CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko sites.
