A few years ago, when Shruti Appiah was in India, she wanted to do something we all take for granted: watch Netflix. Yet she wasn’t able to access the Internet because the cricket was on. It was 7 p.m. on a weeknight and the entire city was trying to steam the match, but the infrastructure couldn’t handle the demand. 

Appiah also experienced the frustrations of infrastructure in the developing world as a business owner. She had a start-up in the decentralized physical infrastructure, or DePIN, space before DePIN was conceptualized that helped people capture solar energy to create a local decentralized energy grid. They then turned around and sold the energy to their locality. The project focused on migrant slum communities in various cities in India that didn’t have infrastructure or a connection to the electrical grid. 

It was a full circle moment when Appiah discovered Huddle, a decentralized real-time video conferencing solution with 4 times better performance and latency compared with Zoom. 

After spending previous years working in product and strategy at Input Output, ConsenSys, Blockscience and IBM, Appiah joined Huddle as the chief economist to help create decentralized networks that expand access to high-quality video and audio conferencing services in developing nations – and use blockchain technology to build new socioeconomic operating systems with good incentive mechanisms that everyone can access. 

Public utilities shouldn’t be for-profit 

Long fascinated by how humanity has fallen short in finding the best way to distribute value, web3 was an inevitable place for Appiah to land. 

“The problem has to do with the entirety of the way that economies are organized today,” she said to me in an interview. “The developing world is facing much of that burden because they’re working with really hard constraints. For example, population growth is unprecedented, while at the same time, infrastructure is not able to keep up.” 

Basic infrastructure is either regulated or available freely in the open market, because it’s deemed a basic necessity. The problem is cyber infrastructure, which is owned by privatized businesses such as AWS, is not.  

Appiah believes cyber infrastructure is also becoming a necessity that cannot continue to be privatized – which is where DePIN comes in. 

“The idea with DePIN is to open up cyber infrastructure, and all the applications that are built on top can become open as well,” she said. “People aren’t barred from using the apps due to higher costs imposed by cyber infrastructure companies.” She added, “We want the entire stack to be completely open and decentralized.” 

Centralization causes global outage 

Only 35 percent of people in developing nations have Internet access. DePIN can jumpstart these services and avoid the confines of crumbling infrastructure that corrupt and inept governments are not maintaining. DePIN can also bring a new global cohort online, giving them reliable access to the tools they need. 

However, the worldwide IT outage on July 19 based on a failure at CrowdStrike showed vividly the problems associated with a single point of failure and drilled home the need for decentralization in the western world as well. 

Specific cases of how Huddle has been used include in Indian villages with poor connectivity where Zoom didn’t work, for community calls after a social media app got shadow banned on Discord, and in the United Arab Emirates where Facetime, Skype and WhatsApp don’t work. 

Apps such as Zoom, Google Meet and Slack also track users, while Huddle has a zero data-collection policy and enhanced security against tracking, harvesting and censorship via cryptographic protocols. In other words, users aren’t monetized. 

Huddle Meet has enabled over 2.5 million minutes clocked to date on the platform, while also minimizing server cost for audio and video calls by 95 percent compared to AWS. 

The decentralized nodes are able to provide bandwidth and proximity, offering much better latency and easier ways to access it, according to Appiah. She wants to see users become “prosumers,” meaning they’re producing as well as using and are part owners of the infrastructure they’re using. 

“As a part owner, you don’t just stand to benefit from the product, you also stand to benefit from ownership of the means of production,” she said. “This is a huge game changer coming from the old model where we had owners and users.”

A key part of this open ownership model are nodes, which give users financial skin in the game and governance power. Every node operator is a core supplier of the network. By using multiple nodes, Huddle eliminates the single point of failure risk. 

Access to real-time communication is becoming an essential basic human right, just like access to water and electricity. DePIN could be a way to dismantle the legacy system in the developing world, and increasingly so, in the censorship-stricken west. 

lead image: Shruti Appiah