Kuleen believes that energy DePIN will become one of the most active and interesting trends in the near future.

Interview: Laser, Co-founder of Starpower

Guest: Kuleen, Head of DePIN at the Solana Foundation

In the context of the rapid development of DePIN, Starpower co-founder Laser discussed with Kuleen, the head of DePIN at the Solana Foundation, why Solana will focus on supporting energy DePIN projects in the coming year.

The audio recording and translation were generated by GPT, so there may be some errors. Please listen to the full podcast:

Opening Introduction

The Vision and Positioning of Starpower

Laser: Hello, Kuleen. It is a great honor for us to have you as the first guest on our inaugural DePIN Power blog. We named it DePIN Power because Starpower is an energy project, so we feel the name is very meaningful. Before we start this podcast, I think it’s best for both sides to introduce themselves to the audience, and I will start first.

For those interested in Starpower, we are an open distributed energy network protocol. In simple terms, you can think of us as the Web3 version of Tesla. Unlike Tesla's proprietary approach, we are more like Android, which is open-source, compared to iOS. We strive to connect third-party energy devices, especially energy storage batteries. By horizontally integrating third-party manufacturers and vertically using DePIN to stimulate network growth, Starpower expects to surpass Tesla in the number of energy device connections within five years. Starpower is developing our mainnet, which is expected to launch in the first quarter of next year, and we are currently conducting airdrop activities before the mainnet launch. Personally, I previously worked at Hashkey and have been building Starpower for the past two years, and I am very optimistic about the development of DePIN in the energy sector. Kuleen, you are the first guest on our podcast, and we would like to learn about you and your work at the Solana Foundation.

The Mission of the Solana Foundation and Kuleen's Role, the Intersection of DePIN and Energy

Kuleen:

First of all, I am very honored to participate in this podcast, and I am very interested in the intersection of DePIN and energy. I believe that energy DePIN will become one of the most active and interesting trends in the near future. This includes not only short-term trends over the next three to six months but also a longer time span. I believe that in the next ten years, the world's energy infrastructure will undergo tremendous changes. So this is really exciting, and I feel privileged to be at the starting line of this journey!

About myself, I am a member of the Solana Foundation team. I have been working at Solana for about four years, mainly collaborating with teams within the ecosystem to help them succeed. I lead several internal teams, but the most relevant to this conversation is that I lead the DePIN work at the Solana Foundation. I am honored to work with some OG projects in the DePIN space, such as Helium and Hivemapper, and I am increasingly collaborating with teams of the next phase of DePIN projects, especially teams like Starpower in the energy sector. Before joining Solana and the crypto space, I worked in finance and quantitative trading, which is actually one of the reasons I am very interested in energy. Energy has not only technical elements but also a very interesting market operation. For example, energy prices can be negative, and the volatility of electricity in the intraday market is significant; it is truly a unique field. Therefore, besides its importance in society, I also find it an interesting intellectual game.

Latest Developments of Solana in DePIN

Laser: I remember when we met in New York in August, you mentioned a professor's perspective that was impressive, saying that moving electrons in electricity is like moving bytes on the internet. But before we dive deeper into the DePIN energy sector, can we talk more about Solana? Currently, Solana's market cap has just reached $100 billion, so I think you can share your thoughts on the recent developments in Solana DePIN, what new projects excite you, and discuss Solana's next steps in DePIN.

Kuleen:

Regarding Solana or the market cap of Sol, I think this is beneficial for the entire ecosystem, but it is not my primary focus every day. My main goal when I wake up each day is to help people build great products on Solana. Regarding DePIN, I think some things we are focusing on and excited about will drive the next growth phase of the entire crypto ecosystem.

DePIN is a very broad concept that encompasses different types of problems or industries where the DePIN model can be applied, and energy is clearly one of them. Applying the DePIN approach to the energy sector can solve many problems, and these problems can even be segmented from multiple angles. But I will stop here; we are very interested in this direction.

Another historically significant subfield of DePIN is the telecommunications industry, which obviously includes Helium. But the telecom field has many layers, such as providing wireless 5G coverage, offering IoT coverage through LoRa, or some products we are seeing now trying to provide broadband internet. There are many different ways to achieve this through the DePIN approach. For example, besides the Helium team we mentioned, there are teams like XNET that recently migrated from Polygon to Solana, which are addressing this issue in different ways. I think telecommunications is a great problem set for DePIN, so I expect to see many projects.

Additionally, we are seeing a similar but different trend, which is the rise of decentralized CDN (Content Delivery Network) infrastructure. Teams like Pipe Network or Gradient are essentially building DePIN networks to store content locally. They are trying to gain some cost benefits from this. I think this type of CDN DePIN infrastructure is fantastic, and interestingly, this has actually been happening without crypto technology. As far as I know, especially in China, there are already some services operating DePIN networks to some extent. However, their payment methods are not through tokens but through manual payments made by someone on WeChat. For example, in a WeChat group, someone will make the payment. This means that the core of the product is already there; now we just need to introduce the token incentive mechanism and the elegance of crypto infrastructure to this issue. I think this will be very interesting.

Moreover, there are some other issues. I will try to be brief; there are many other issues that I think are also suitable for DePIN, such as sensor networks, which require very broad sensor coverage. There is a team discussing their desire to apply it to drone safety, thus needing sensors to measure drone activity. Initially, they were working on drone safety at very high-profile events like Taylor Swift concerts. But now they want to expand their drone safety capabilities over larger geographical areas and longer time frames. Therefore, they are now considering using the DePIN approach to achieve this goal.

I think this is really cool. There are so many problems that need distributed hardware solutions, and DePIN is an effective way to address these issues. We are now seeing many related experiments. So, overall, when you ask me what excites me, I might have covered it all, but that is indeed the case.

The Deep Integration of Solana and DePIN

Laser: Currently, many DePIN projects are emerging, some of which have migrated to Solana, while others were born on Solana from the start, like us. After communicating with so many projects, what do you think are the main reasons why so many projects choose to build on Solana? Perhaps you can mention the three most important reasons.

Kuleen:

You know, there is some interesting history here. I actually think that the teams like Hivemapper, Helium, or Render initially chose Solana for two reasons. First is cultural fit; I mean, based on my experience, the founders of DePIN tend to be the most pragmatic type of founders in the crypto space. They just want to build a great product, and for them, the DePIN network is a means to an end. It needs to work well, be fast, cost-effective, and provide a good experience for the users involved. If you have this very pragmatic engineering mindset, I think you would tend to like Solana because Solana is culturally very pragmatic, and as a system, it is designed that way: how to be cheap, fast, and high-quality. I think this is actually one of the reasons that attracted some early DePIN founders to choose Solana; it is almost a cultural fit.

Of course, I think this is also related to the fact that Solana as a network is indeed different from others. If you look at any data on on-chain activity, Solana's on-chain activity volume is several orders of magnitude larger than all other active public chains, and it has been rigorously tested at this scale.

So even in the early days, many people noticed, "Hey, guys, Solana is fundamentally designed differently and is designed in a better way." With this cultural element and the appeal of Solana as a technology, these attracted many people early on. Two years ago, the main reasons people were attracted to Solana were these, and they still hold true today. But Solana also has some new features.

Especially now, Solana can be said to be one of the largest economies in the crypto space, at least by certain metrics. If you look at the activity on DEXs and where those especially new users are first encountering cryptocurrency, more and more of these users are choosing Solana. So for new DePIN projects now, when they observe this space, Solana has excellent technology and a strong economic foundation. People ultimately want their projects to succeed, and I think one element of building a successful token economy is to be in the most powerful on-chain economy, and Solana is gradually becoming such an economy. Lastly, I would say that the community aspect of Solana is also attracting DePIN projects.

Now, if you are a DePIN founder on Solana, you will find many other outstanding founders on Solana who can communicate, learn, and provide help with you. This is a community that has grown significantly recently, but it is still small enough and closely-knit, where people know each other. Moreover, they tend to be very open and helpful. We are at a great point in time where Solana's technology is highly scalable, and the economy is one of the best. I can rely on other DePIN founders, sometimes not just on the founders but on the combinatorial capabilities of these protocols, like Helium and Hivemapper, where Hivemapper can now use Helium nodes for location verification.

If you are a driver for Hivemapper, you can use Helium to prove that you took a photo at a certain location. Because everything is built on this single underlying layer of Solana, there is no fragmentation, which makes it easier for protocols to combine.

Overall, the early attraction was cultural fit, and now it has appeal in terms of technology, economy, and community. Solana has become a place where other applications can interoperate.

Laser: Great sharing! Culture, technology, and economy—these three points are not only the reasons why DePIN chooses Solana but also the reasons why Solana has become a leader in this cycle. I also want to share Starpower's experience on why we want to build on Solana. The first reason is that when we started Starpower two years ago, teams like Helium were migrating from their own chains to Solana, so this was a great reference for us and a good example of how to build smart contracts on Solana. Additionally, the potential user base in the energy sector may far exceed the number of hotspot telecom users. Currently, we have about 20,000 devices that need to report data on-chain every few minutes, with daily transaction volumes potentially reaching 3 to 5 million. So from a technical perspective, I think Solana is not a "better choice" or "more suitable," but rather a "must-go" for us; there are no other options. So I think the answer is culture, technology, and economy, and Solana has the largest user base.

How to Improve Solana

Kuleen: I can slightly shift this question—are there areas where you wish the development experience on Solana could be better? Solana has many advantages, but I always think, well, all these things are great, so what can be improved? What can get better?

Laser: Well, I personally have received very good support from you, Kuleen; your support has been outstanding. I think maintaining this culture and community interaction, especially with so many new projects being built on Solana, could be a challenge.

Kuleen:

This is something we think about often. It’s interesting; one thing we firmly believe is that as this ecosystem takes off, Solana's scale will grow exponentially. In relation to this exponential growth, what should the Solana Foundation look like as an organization? One thing that many people may not know is that the Solana Foundation currently has only about fifty to sixty people, so it is not a large organization. Sometimes people are surprised that there are only these many people. Interestingly, this scale has remained relatively unchanged over the past two years. It has neither shrunk significantly nor expanded significantly. One reason is that we place a high value on maintaining high-quality standards for each member; this is not a place that suits everyone for many reasons. Additionally, I think we lean towards a "small government" philosophy. We do not want the foundation to expand alongside the exponential growth of the ecosystem. People always rely on us. We want to solve common problems but do not want to be the object of validation for everyone. Therefore, sometimes people will ask you, for example, "I am building product X; do you think I should build it?" or "What do you think should be built?" I feel you shouldn’t be asking me that question; I am not your customer. Maybe in some cases I will be, but usually not. My role is to solve your problems, so you should tell me what you want to build and what resources you need to build it. Therefore, we have a very clear view of the role and responsibilities of the foundation, one of which is to maintain a small scale relative to the ecosystem. But we also want to ensure that we serve those building on Solana well. As the number of developers grows, we need to find ways to achieve this. I cannot be on Telegram 24/7, even though some people would like me to. So we are focusing on finding more scalable processes and so on. Yes, I accept your feedback; this is something we think about often.

Energy as a Key Area for DePIN

Laser: Yes, I think there can be different approaches. One approach is to expand the foundation team, and another more natural approach is to encourage more interaction among the community, as you mentioned, so that as the ecosystem grows exponentially, everyone can learn from and help each other more.

I have another question I want to ask. I remember we discussed this topic before. Energy is becoming a leading topic in DePIN; what are your thoughts on this? Is energy a primary focus for Solana DePIN?

Kuleen:

Yes, I think it is fair to say that energy is one of the most exciting things I expect in the next 6 to 12 months.

There are several reasons.

First, at a very high level, the world has recognized that energy infrastructure needs to change. We see that climate change is indeed happening. Its impacts are quite significant, such as the intensity of hurricanes, and these changes are quite bad and severe; that’s one. Secondly, energy demand may soar in the coming years, depending on the efficiency of energy models and the growing demand for large language models. Generally, there is a strong correlation between a country's wealth and its energy consumption. So if we expect more and more places in the world to become wealthy, energy consumption will also increase. Therefore, all these factors will play a role in the next 5 to 10 years, while energy infrastructure traditionally changes very slowly.

Another macro trend is the price changes of renewable energy sources like solar energy. For example, the manufacturing costs of solar panels are continuously decreasing. We know that Moore's Law predicts how semiconductor capabilities double rapidly, and the cost of solar panels is decreasing even faster than this law predicts, making solar energy very cost-competitive now. Overall, renewable energy is becoming more useful and economically viable, and you see these factors all at play.

Energy is essentially a distributed problem because the transportation and storage of energy are not free, so you need to have equipment or hardware in various locations to solve these issues, which is precisely how DePIN addresses problems. From this perspective, a large part of my excitement comes from this. We have the right elements, especially governments, like the U.S. government, willing to subsidize or fund these projects on a large scale. Therefore, to some extent, there is also financial support driving these things.

So, in summary, these are many reasons driving my interest in energy DePIN; I feel there are many positive factors pushing this change. Lastly, I want to say that what has really made me pay more attention to this field in the past 8-9 months is that we are now seeing perhaps the last and most important element—very talented founders starting to tackle this issue, just like you all. Without those capable individuals to solve problems, all other conditions would be useless. So now we have all these conditions and the talent, and everything can begin.

How Web3 Attracts Talent from Traditional Industries

Laser: I mean, I basically agree with you; I follow the same thought process, looking at the problem from a higher level and then delving into smaller, more specific challenges and solutions, and all these different factors amplify each other. I personally come from the traditional finance industry and knew nothing about energy before, but all these factors have sparked my interest in this challenge, and I have followed these signals. Another issue you mentioned is talent. Now is a good time for energy, but we are still a Web3 project, and attracting talent from the Web2 industry to join us is indeed not easy. My co-founder, Dr. Darcy, has worked in the renewable energy sector for nearly 10 years. Previously, I thought it was difficult to attract talent from the energy industry to join the Web3 space to solve energy issues; it was almost impossible. But now, because of the previous bull market, people have started to understand Bitcoin and blockchain, as well as DePIN projects like Helium and Filecoin, which have made them aware of what DePIN is, just like Darcy learned about DePIN in the last bull market and saw the potential to solve the challenges posed by solar panels using this approach.

Kuleen:

Regarding the talent issue, I want to quickly comment. I think you are very right; it is indeed challenging to recruit for specific types of crypto projects because traditional industries do not understand crypto, and some even have very negative views. Especially after the FTX incident in December 2022 or January 2023, if you tried to attract talent to the crypto space at that time, others might have told you to get lost. But situations can change very quickly. For example, the election results last week, regardless of how you view them, give me a sense that more people will be willing to join the crypto space because they now feel that regulatory risks may have decreased, and token prices are rising. But when the bull market comes, the opposite problem arises—many people are interested in crypto, but it is hard to discern who is genuinely serious and who just wants to make a quick buck. So you go from having no suitable talent to having a large pool of talent sources, but the average quality drops significantly. Therefore, the challenges of recruitment vary with the changing market environment.

Comparison of DePIN and DeVIN and the Future

Laser: I completely agree. Additionally, global industry trends—I don’t know what you think; I don’t have left or right views, but thanks to Trump, people in the crypto industry feel that the bull market is coming. One last question: what do you think about some DeVIN projects and DePIN projects? To me, decentralized virtual DeVIN projects seem easier to attract users, while DePIN projects are more challenging; for example, the largest DePIN project, Helium, only has a million physical device users. What do you think about this? Does Solana prefer DeVIN projects or DePIN projects?

Kuleen:

I don't think there is a preference. I feel it just depends on where you make trade-offs. DeVIN may be easier in terms of user acquisition, but maintaining a lead may be more difficult. The ease of installation for DeVIN means that users can easily install your software as well as that of other competitors. In some areas, I expect to see aggregation phenomena, such as users who just want to maximize their returns, like bandwidth usage, can choose to offer their bandwidth to the highest bidder at any time. Therefore, in certain areas, there will be tools like Jupiter that provide aggregation for different DeVIN protocols, and there will also be aggregators for DePIN protocols. This is just different trade-offs; I think DeVIN projects like Grass indeed solve certain problems in a very unique and powerful way. They should exist, but as a business or protocol, they need to consider how to truly retain users. For DePIN projects, users typically need to invest more, such as installing devices, which means users are more invested and more likely to stick with it long-term. If you can get past this barrier, it also means they are less likely to install your competitors' devices because it requires a lot of extra work, and the returns may be limited. So overall, this just illustrates that both have great prospects, but they face different challenges depending on what problem you are trying to solve and what type of network you are dealing with.

Laser: It sounds like DePIN users are more loyal to the project.

Kuleen:

This is also a moat for DePIN projects. If you become the biggest player like Helium, it is hard to be replaced by competitors in a short time.

Laser: Yes. I think we are nearing the end. Kuleen, do you have any other insights or opinions you would like to share?

Kuleen:

I don't have any specific insights to share at the moment. But if you are listening to this podcast and considering building something in the DePIN space, feel free to reach out to me; I would be very happy to chat. If you are building something on Solana and encounter issues or feel that certain areas need improvement, please let me know; that is the most useful feedback for me. If you have some ideas you are pondering, I welcome you to share them with me. I can't say I have any insights, but I am very eager to receive more feedback.

Laser: Awesome, Kuleen, you are the best person I have met at the Solana Foundation, thank you so much for taking the time.

Kuleen: Thank you.

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