Decentralised Finance demonstrated that blockchain-native applications could displace traditional financial intermediaries for specific use cases. dePIN is making a parallel claim about physical infrastructure: that token incentives can coordinate hardware deployment more efficiently than corporate capital allocation. The mechanisms are similar; the assets being tokenised are different.

Both DeFi and dePIN use token incentives to bootstrap liquidity or hardware before product-market fit is proven. Both use smart contracts to enforce rules without trusted intermediaries. Both are permissionless: anyone with the right assets can participate. Both are transparent: all financial flows are on-chain. And both have suffered from tokenomics where inflation outpaces real value creation.

DeFi's primary value is financial intermediation — the assets being moved are tokens. dePIN's primary value is physical services — the assets being delivered are compute, storage, bandwidth, and data. This means dePIN has an anchor to the real economy that DeFi protocols often lack. A GPU rendering job is consumed because someone needed rendering done. A Helium hotspot transfers real data for real applications.

DeFi risk is primarily smart contract risk and market risk. dePIN adds hardware risk, regulatory risk for wireless networks, and the operational complexity of running physical infrastructure. See What is dePIN for the foundational overview, and dePIN Tokenomics for how to evaluate whether a protocol's economics are built on real value or pure inflation.