Mahesh Ramakrishnan: The Architect Behind DePIN's Emergence as a Major Industry

Mahesh Ramakrishnan has become one of the most prominent voices shaping the decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN) movement. As a venture investor, thought leader, and organizer, Ramakrishnan has positioned himself at the forefront of what many believe could be the next major evolution in how the world builds and operates its fundamental infrastructure systems.

The DePIN Revolution and Ramakrishnan’s Central Role

DePIN emerged as one of crypto’s most compelling narratives in 2024, with Mahesh Ramakrishnan instrumental in advancing the sector’s development and visibility. Unlike many cryptocurrency initiatives that struggled to find practical applications, DePIN offered something fundamentally different: tangible products that consumers could immediately understand and use, spanning telecommunications, energy production, environmental monitoring, and geospatial services.

The sector distinguished itself from traditional “sharing economy” models like Uber and Airbnb by fundamentally restructuring how value flowed through networks. In DePIN systems, participants directly share rewards through tokenization rather than concentrating profits among shareholders. This architectural difference represented what Ramakrishnan and other industry advocates saw as crypto’s genuine opportunity to create meaningful economic alignment.

From Finance to DePIN Investment Leadership

Ramakrishnan’s journey to becoming a DePIN champion reflects both strategic career moves and genuine conviction about the sector’s potential. After graduating from Harvard in 2018, he initially pursued traditional finance paths at Goldman Sachs before joining Apollo, one of the world’s largest private equity firms. These years, as he describes them, involved substantial investment experience across various sectors.

The inflection point came in 2022 when Ramakrishnan transitioned into the emerging DePIN space through his work administering Helium’s early grant program. Helium itself represented a proof-of-concept—having pioneered decentralized broadband infrastructure beginning in 2016, it served as the template for how tokenized networks could coordinate real-world infrastructure deployment. Working directly with resourceful entrepreneurs building on Helium’s infrastructure, Ramakrishnan witnessed firsthand what he calls a “worth taking a bet on” opportunity.

This conviction led him to co-found EV3 Ventures, a venture capital firm specifically focused on DePIN investments and ecosystem development. Beyond capital deployment, Ramakrishnan has actively shaped industry discourse, most notably by organizing the DePIN Summit in New York during August 2024, which brought together key stakeholders from across the emerging infrastructure layer.

The Market Scale and Economic Reasoning

The scale of DePIN’s development justifies Ramakrishnan’s confidence. The collective market capitalization of DePIN projects has surpassed $20 billion as of 2024, with research firm Messari—which itself coined the DePIN terminology following a public naming contest in 2022—estimating the sector’s broader economic impact in the trillions of dollars.

Ramakrishnan identifies two converging factors driving this growth. First, traditional infrastructure systems managed by governments, large corporations, and established financial institutions have increasingly fallen behind the rate of global infrastructure needs. Second, DePIN networks have begun demonstrating superior economics and functionality compared to their centralized counterparts. Telecommunications represents a particularly compelling case study, where decentralized networks show potential advantages in deployment speed, cost efficiency, and service quality.

Positioning DePIN Within Broader Economic Transformation

Ramakrishnan contextualizes DePIN within a longer arc of societal transformation. Following the 2008 financial crisis, he argues, confidence in traditional hierarchical institutions weakened, opening space for alternative organizational models. DePIN represents this alternative—systems where participants retain greater autonomy and capture value more directly through their contributions.

This perspective elevates DePIN beyond a mere technological innovation into a structural rethinking of how societies coordinate infrastructure provision. Rather than centralized entities like Verizon or T-Mobile controlling telecommunications networks, or government-managed utilities controlling power grids, DePIN proposes that these systems could operate through token-coordinated networks where individual participants become stakeholders.

Forward-Looking Perspectives on DePIN Development

As the sector matured through 2024 and into 2025, Ramakrishnan outlined three specific predictions for how DePIN would evolve. First, he anticipated that state and local governments would begin deploying DePIN systems to manage renewable energy production and incentivize distributed generation. Second, he projected that DePIN platforms would introduce tiered reward structures, allocating greater compensation to participants with superior performance ratings and established reputations within their networks.

Third, and perhaps most significantly, Ramakrishnan predicted that developing nations would emerge as leaders in adopting decentralized infrastructure solutions. This reflects both the immediate infrastructure urgency in these regions and the documented “leapfrog” pattern seen across other technology domains, where capital-constrained regions sometimes bypass incumbent solutions to adopt newer approaches.

The Path Forward

The infrastructure investment landscape in 2025 and into 2026 reflects Ramakrishnan’s assessment. Hundreds of millions in capital continue flowing into DePIN ventures across dozens of industries, suggesting sustained institutional confidence in the sector’s trajectory. For Ramakrishnan personally, DePIN represents not merely an investment thesis but a vehicle for creating tangible, on-the-ground improvements in how global infrastructure functions—aligning financial incentives with genuine utility, a combination that has proven elusive in many prior technology cycles.