Interchain Jam Highlights — DePIN Expansion

Welcome to Interchain Jam Highlights, a new series recapping the live X Interchain Jam sessions hosted by the ICF’s Robb Stack with founders and developers of interchain projects. Discover the exciting products being built with the Interchain Stack and learn more about the continued innovation in the interchain. This edition focuses on DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks), the hottest trend in the space right now, and how four popular interchain projects, Sentinel, Althea Network, Soarchain, and Jackal Protocol, are driving the sector’s growth.

Getting to Know the Interchain — Althea Network

Athea Network aims to provide connectivity and open-access infrastructure for all, bringing blockchain-enabled internet access to thousands of homes since 2018. Recently launched to mainnet, Althea L1 provides a frictionless alternative for autonomous machines and self-sovereign infrastructure networks. Deborah Simpier is the CEO and co-founder of Hawk Networks, which developed Althea Network’s machine-to-machine protocol and routing stack and helped build the Althea L1 blockchain on the Cosmos SDK.

What motivated the Althea team to focus on connectivity? Deborah explains the current infrastructure isn’t working due to inefficient designs. “About one in four people in the US don’t have adequate internet,” she says. The problem isn’t just challenging topography or lack of funding. The US has invested over $100 billion to make “less than a 1% dent in connectivity.”

Many users are siloed into contracts with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and stuck on monthly payment plans with poor-quality internet. Althea Network provides an alternative cost-efficient solution, allowing users to choose their cost dynamically based on latency or usage, creating greater efficiency for providers and users alike. To date, Althea Network has facilitated 4 PB of internet traffic across 12 states and four countries and is witnessing rising institutional demand for machine-to-machine payments.

Sentinel

Sentinel offers a decentralized VPN (dVPN) built on top of the Cosmos SDK that provides censorship-resistant internet access to users around the globe. Aleksandr Litreev, CEO and founder of Solar Labs, the core developer of Sentinel, says, “The general mission is bringing the freedom of internet connectivity, including freedom of speech and freedom to stay online anonymously and privately, and the integrity of communications for everyone.”

Sentinel was born in response to increasing government crackdowns on internet freedoms, with the real trigger being Aleksandr’s home country Russia attempting (and failing) to ban its most popular messaging app, Telegram, in 2018. Since then, internet restrictions have deepened globally, with countries like Turkmenistan even starting to ban VPNs. “They cannot ban web3,” Aleksandr says. Sentinel has amassed 359,000 users and 7,500 dVPN nodes worldwide, all “volunteers contributing to the global mission.”

Complimenting its dVPN, Sentinel is building additional tools, including a new SDK that enables users to build their own custom VPN application on top of Sentinel and integrate Sentinel’s capabilities of bypassing regional restrictions. If an application like TikTok or YouTube were banned in a user’s country, they could still gain full access through Sentinel’s SDK. Sentinel is also focused on the data scraping problem for AI engineers and will enable permissionless access to its decentralized nodes to provide data for developers to train their language and machine learning models using decentralized networks.

Soarchain

Soarchain is a Layer 1 DePIN focused on transforming the mobility industry through a token-incentivized data and connectivity infrastructure. Soarchain aims to provide cities with smarter, more efficient, eco-friendly mobility solutions using blockchain and decentralized tech. Co-founder and CTO Deniz Kalaslioglu explains, “Soarchain is designed to serve highly mobile nodes and to handle extreme amounts of data. Our goal is to unlock the potential of the data and connectivity ecosystem in mobility by providing this logical paradigm where everyone gets incentivized… from car manufacturers to end-users.”

Deniz explains that despite the progress electric vehicles have made in the last 10 years, “They always hit a wall when it comes to the lack of a connectivity layer. Car manufacturers want to implement this technology, but they don’t have the necessary manufacturing pipelines. Even adding a $10 or $20 module on top of their cars, which would ultimately bring a lot of benefits, they can only do in a five or 10-year period. They are very slow moving.”

Soarchain is bridging this data gap and building the missing connectivity layer for electric vehicle manufacturers. Its Soarchain Mini is a plug-and-play device that fits different vehicle and user configurations and incentivizes them with SOAR rewards through its Proof-of-Availability mechanism. In the short term, Soarchain is bringing vehicles to the interchain and creating myriad use cases for IBC-enabled projects in mobility. In the longer term, the compamy seeks to provide a vast lake of quality data verified for authenticity, integrity, and plausibility to interchain projects.

Jackal Protocol

Jackal Protocol is a trustless cloud storage ecosystem that guarantees your data is always available and exclusively yours. Eliminating the need for third parties in the cloud storage equation, Jackal is the only Proof-of-Stake L1 storage protocol currently and can offer storage speeds unrivaled in the space. Co-founder and CEO of Jackal Labs, Patrick Dunlop, explains, “Blockchains are good at a lot of stuff, they’re not great at storage. We deliver all that functionality locally, cross-chain, using IBC and the Interchain Stack, connecting the worlds of privacy and cloud storage.”

Jackal Labs’ founders have a shared background in digital forensics, which requires a “clean forensic environment where you’re the only person with access to the drive and have full custody of its contents.” This type of highly sensitive information cannot be stored in a traditional cloud due to the threat of vulnerabilities, hackers, and single points of failure. Jackal’s decentralized cloud provides an impenetrable environment for users and multi-region verifiable backups for data. If an outage or natural disaster prevented one data center from posting storage proofs, the system would auto-heal and a new storage provider would be alerted.

This secure, autonomous, decentralized storage solution gives Jackal Labs a leading edge over traditional cloud providers. Patrick explains, “Web2 doesn’t want all the complexities of blockchain and web3 wallets, buying ATOM, swapping tokens… what they do want is multi-region verifiable backups 200% cheaper than anything else on the market. That is the killer use case.”

Why Build DePIN Projects Using the Interchain Stack

Composable, modular, and open-source, the backbone of the Interchain Stack comprises the Cosmos SDK, CometBFT, IBC, and CosmWasm, enabling interchain projects to retain full sovereignty over their development, create custom modules that fit their specific use case, and interoperate with a growing network of interconnected app chains. How does the Interchain Stack ‘stack up’ against other blockchain ecosystems and what are these DePIN projects’ favorite features about building with interchain tech?

Instant Finality and Usability Unparalleled in the Space

For a DePIN project dealing with commodities like data or bandwidth, instant finality is vital. Deborah explains that Althea was originally built on the Gnosis chain but migrated to the Cosmos SDK after experiencing frequent problems with the EVM. “The EVM of Gnosis or Ethereum-like chains created a lot of problems with the intersection with the real world… when you are dealing with a commodity, in our case bandwidth, being exchanged between two parties, reorganization creates real problems, especially at scale.” The instant finality of Tendermint Core (now CometBFT) enables Althea Network to achieve fast, autonomous machine-to-machine payments in microtransactions with lower fees.

Sentinel also migrated from an Ethereum smart contract to a Cosmos SDK app chain and was one of the earliest projects to recognize the benefits of the Interchain Stack, the Cosmos SDK in particular. Aleksandr says, “At the beginning [being a smart contract on Ethereum] was OK, and it worked. We built a Proof of Concept for our application and showed the world that it’s possible to build a fully decentralized VPN for mass market use.” As Sentinel evolved, however, “We started not to develop, but rather work to combat against Ethereum restrictions… and with fees making the cost of operating our dVPN infrastructure unpredictable… we’re very happy we switched to the Interchain Stack.”

Soarchain’s car-to-car communications and car-to-everything communications exchange a lot of data. The project originally developed its consensus mechanism based on Helium but it failed to meet the project’s needs. Deniz says, “The developments quickly got out of hand, and we had a lot of overhead, we needed to develop the networking stack, the consensus, and all these things. Then we met Tendermint Core [now CometBFT], and what we were able to do in maybe four months, we did in two weeks… After that, we discovered Cosmos SDK, which enabled us to bootstrap the whole thing in about a week.”

Sovereign App Chains Remove Dependencies on Layer 1s

Jackal Labs originally intended to build on the Secret Network but ultimately launched its protocol as an app chain due to the need for full autonomy, sovereignty, and control. Patrick says, “Building a traditional NFT marketplace or a DEX is a single-dimensional thing where you ship it and it launches. There’s not that many moving parts involved. When you’re looking to build a decentralized physical infrastructure network, that changes the game.” Jackal Protocol combines peer-to-peer networks, software, hardware, IT sensors, cameras, and even robotics, adding multiple layers and complexities.

“When you’re building on another blockchain, you add this risk that you need another team or another party to actually ship upgrades for your project to work. You already have so many different levels of risk that you need sovereignty over the blockchain modules, the consensus, block times, and block sizes. All these different things are really core to the ability for Jackal to work… Nowhere else can you build where you have full control, can build custom modules, and add things directly to the chain. It doesn’t make sense to build anywhere else.”

Sentinel doubles down on this crucial point. “First of all, and most importantly, we have complete sovereignty over our own blockchain, which we can modify as we wish to make sure that it’s specifically tailored for our project’s purpose,” Aleksandr confirms.

Custom Modules Are Vital for DePIN Use Cases

Once Soarchain realized the benefits of the Interchain Stack for bootstrapping the project quickly and easily, the team discovered the Cosmos SDK’s custom modules. “These are crucial for our use case,” Deniz says, “we have Proof of Availability, where the vehicles are required to send data proofs to the network to prove their health and availability. The Interchain Stack made this very easy for us. It’s very flexible and upgradable. Not only does it enable the app chain itself but you can build new applications easily on top of it… I personally like it better than Solidity or any other virtual machine logic.”

He continues, “I cannot emphasize the importance of the custom modules enough for our use case, because we also have the hardware aspect, and we’ve implemented these privacy-preserving systems, and a scaling solution, which depends on ZK proofs… None of this would be possible without the Interchain Stack.” Soarchain experimented with “many, many EVM or EVM-like chains, like Avalanche and Polygon. All these big names didn’t really cut it,” Deniz says.

Patrick agrees, “Custom modules are crucial. If you were to build Jackal Protocol as an app layer on another blockchain and not have the sovereignty to add custom modules, you would run into the situation that we ran into, where the gas fees would get out of control. If you don’t control what the gas fees are, a lot of use cases are deleted out of existence purely because the unit economics wouldn’t work.”

Interoperability for Seamless Payments and Transactions

The ability to connect with a growing ecosystem of sovereign app chains and tap into multichain liquidity is vital for DePIN projects. In Althea Network’s case, IBC’s Interchain Accounts facilitate machine-to-machine payments. Deborah says, “IBC is very important, it’s out-of-the-box interoperability with more than 100 chains. Let’s say we have machine-to-machine transactions or we’re doing this RWA tokenizing telco assets and we want to use Interchain Accounts to use lending or DeFi on Osmosis or UMI or whatever, the Interchain Stack makes it easy for us to interoperate with different chains.”

Aleksandr supports this point, “It is absolutely insane how just by integrating IBC, which now comes literally out of the box, we enabled multiple different tokens to be accepted as a means of payment for dVPN traffic. So if you’re holding, let’s say, USDT tokens on IBC, OSMO, ATOM, or whatever, you can pay with these tokens for your dVPN traffic.”

He continues, “There’s a unified ecosystem. Cosmos is not just an SDK, it’s a whole ecosystem, which you can integrate with different modules, and it’s way more powerful compared to Ethereum in terms of scalability, because it’s built to support high transaction throughput, which is essential for applications like Sentinel.”

Wrapping It Up

We’re thrilled to hear so many interchain teams are steering the DePIN revolution with the Interchain Stack. You can keep up to date with Althea Network, Sentinel, Soarchain, and Jackal Protocol by following them on their socials. All four of these inspiring DePIN projects have exciting releases coming up and plenty of dApps to experiment with on their incentivized testnets and mainnets. Let them know what you think! Be sure to tune into the next Interchain Jam session on Thursday, June 27 at 2 PM UTC with Cosmos Hub, Valence, and Secret Network.