Recapping an incredible DePIN Summit 2025: Africa Edition. Thanks to EV3 for bringing DePIN Summit to East Africa, Share, Singularity Venture Hub, our own team, ZICTIA, all of the organizers, venues, various staff and execution teams, speakers, and participants for being a part of this. Thanks as well to Proof of Coverage for some of the photos included in this post. Others are my own (see if you can spot the quality difference!).

Over the course of a powerful week in East Africa, DePIN enthusiasts, builders, founders, investors, government stakeholders, and dreamers from around the globe gathered for DePIN Summit 2025, a one-of-a-kind gathering that brought decentralized physical infrastructure to life through conversation, community, and concrete impact.

The summit unfolded in two acts: Mombasa, Kenya and Zanzibar, Tanzania, with some joining for a closing journey to Arusha and sticking around Zanzibar to further solidify discussions and work towards tangible outcomes.

🔗Part I: Mombasa

🔗Sunday June 29: Day Zero: Arrival & Alignment

As the sun set over the Kenyan coast, founders, speakers, and project leads touched down in Mombasa. The Share team, on-the-ground co-organizers of the first leg of the summit, hosted an informal gathering at their HQ, setting the tone for what would be a high-trust, high-purpose summit experience.

🔗Monday June 30: Day One: Learning from the Ground Up

We visited two Bridge International Academies where students and teachers are already engaging with digital learning through tablets, despite having a shaky power supply and not having an internet connection on-site. Currently, staff use a single smartphone to upload daily progress.

Share will soon equip the school with unlimited WiFi access, using its innovative technology to support and elevate the quality of student learning. It’s a powerful initiative, and one that rightly earned them praise for turning bold vision into real-world impact.

We’re thinking the obvious – and we’re exploring with the Share team how we can support in bringing ThreeFold nodes to Mombasa to ensure these schools will not have just have their connectivity, but that their own capacity as well.

During our visit, some students showed off local song and dance while others even prepared and performed spoken word poetry on the theme of the Internet. Later, that evening, a community dinner allowed conversations to deepen among builders, speakers, and local partners.

Do you spot our tall friends in the background? An epic photobomb and overall experience at Nguuni Nature Sanctuary.

🔗Tuesday July 01: Day Two: Build on the Beach & Dine on a Dhow

As a pre-summit kickoff, Beach & Build offered a relaxed afternoon on the Mombasa shoreline, designed for connection, collaboration, and casual networking, setting the tone for the week ahead.

Later in the evening, we enjoyed “DePIN on Deck,” aboard a traditional Swahili coast dhow boat. With stunning coastal views, fresh seafood, and vibrant conversations, guests enjoyed a relaxed, intimate setting to connect and unwind.

🔗Wednesday July 02: Day Three: DePIN Summit Launches

The first official summit day featured a full agenda of talks, demos, and showcases. Hosted at the headquarters of Swahilipot Hub, a foundation focused on nurturing youth talent through tech, arts, and entrepreneurship, the summit opened with EV3 and Share explaining why and why now for the summit to be held in Africa and introducing Share as a project.

The audience included mostly students and local and international entrepreneurs and founders. ThreeFold co-founder Florian Fournier delivered a keynote on the future of decentralized internet in East Africa.

Florian spoke about the ThreeFold story and showed off one of the original ThreeFold nodes (perched on top of the podium).

The other projects that gave keynotes included DeCharge, Arkreen, Titan, Element Pay, Onocoy, WeatherXM, RealityNet, Pickspot, Qualoo, Natix, and more.

🔗Part II: Zanzibar

🔗Thursday July 03: Day Zero: Crossing to Zanzibar

Some speakers and attendees took a chartered flight from Mombasa to Zanzibar, bringing the summit spirit over the Indian Ocean to Spice Island.

We were joined by new attendees and warmly welcomed with a sunset session to set intentions for the second leg of the summit.

🔗Friday July 04: Day One: Public Infrastructure Meets Policy

The first official day of the Zanzibar summit was held at the Madinat Al Bahr. The event brought together global builders and Zanzibar’s local ecosystem, including Eng. Shukuru Awadh Suleiman, Director General of Zanzibar Communication Corporation (ZICTIA), our partner on the ground on the island.

ThreeFold co-founder Kristof De Spiegeleer started with a presentation on ThreeFold and what it enables in East Africa and beyond.

There were also presentations from WeatherXM, Arkreen, Natix, Reality, Qualoo, Peaq (ThreeFold partner), DeCharge, Share, Swahili Pot, and Africa Amini Life. Along with that, we had:

• Investment Panel: Investing in DePIN, featuring Dylan, Rapolas, and Volt
• Ecosystem Panel: Flora (Sahara Ventures) and Msechu (Serengeti Angels) outlined challenges and opportunities across the region, hosted by Sal of EV3

Towards the end of the day, Kristof was joined on stage by Eng. Shukuru Awadh Suleiman of ZICTIA to discuss the collaboration between ThreeFold and the government of Zanzibar.

Following a long but inspiring day, the guests enjoyed Swahili BBQ with live music and with local artist Tryphon Evarist.

🔗Saturday July 05: Day Two: Demo Day & Closing Ceremony

At the historic Mbweni Ruins, DePIN builders showcased their hardware, software, and product experiences. Florian led a visit to the land of Dunia Cyber City and Zanzibar Free Zone.

WeatherXM deployed some of their hardware in Kenya and we’re working on getting a station live here in Zanzibar!

Builders from around the world presented real-world solutions for emerging markets.

Later, the community gathered with Light DAO for a thought session with Kristof and Florian, followed by a closing celebration with local music and performances to honor both global innovators and the communities they serve.

Students from the Dhow Countries Music Academy in Stone Town, Zanzibar performed and brought summit attendees on stage to participate.

🔗Part III: Arusha

Following the summit, a group of 35 attendees traveled to Arusha for a post-summit visit to experience authentic Tanzania. The trip included a safari and time with the Maasai tribe at one of their lodges, as well as a visit to a local school where students received tablets on their first day back. Both the lodge stay and the school visit are part of the Africa Amini Life project, with a portion of the lodge proceeds helping to fund the school, medical clinics, and other key local institutions.

ThreeFold and Africa Amini Alliance are working to collaborate to bring further digital inclusion to even the most remote communities in Tanzania.

Then, nearly twenty of us returned to Zanzibar to reunite with other summit attendees and ground the ideas and discussions from the summit into tangible next steps.

🔗Final Reflections

What an unforgettable experience. We were honored to co-host this landmark event along with EV3 and Share, and deeply proud to have showcased a diverse range of groundbreaking DePIN projects while spotlighting Africa as a powerful hub for emerging technology and innovation.

From Mombasa to Zanzibar to Arusha, we saw the DePIN vision become real.

We didn’t just talk about decentralized infrastructure.

We lived it.

Onward! Together we build.

More to share and more to come as concrete outcomes develop.

Watch the demo here with timestamps for easy navigation, and leave your feedback here.

Please take a moment to review the GEP addressing June’s minting.

🚨 Voting is now open and will run until July 7th at 10:00 AM CEST. Please cast your vote via:

• dashboard.grid.tf under “TFChain - DAO”
• or the TF Connect app

ℹ️ On a separate note: According to the latest discussion on April’s re-mint, it is expected to be implemented along with June’s payout.

As always we look forward to and appreciate community feedback.

Greetings from Mombasa, Kenya! DePIN Summit Africa is getting underway this week, with Share hosting the first leg in Mombasa and ThreeFold hosting the Zanzibar side of things.

The summit brings together founders, actors, and investors in the space of Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) with local stakeholders to explore the future of infrastructure and infrastructure ownership.

We will be sharing as we go, stay tuned in here and on X.

🔗The Structural Bias Toward Centralization in AI

Modern AI development is deeply centralized. Today’s most advanced models are created, hosted, and controlled by a small group of corporations with vast computational resources and privileged access to proprietary data. This isn’t mere conjecture by the way. It is the most obvious outcome of how modern machine learning works:

🔗Scale Rewards Capital

The most capable AI models are those trained on vast datasets, using enormous compute, for extended durations. That means:

• $100M+ training budgets
• Clusters of the latest NVIDIA enterprise grade GPUs
• Proprietary pre-training data pipelines

Only a handful of companies, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, Anthropic, Microsoft, can compete. Startups, researchers, and sovereign nations without this infrastructure are locked out of cutting-edge development.

🔗AIs Are Easier to Control Than Humans

Artificial intelligences are orders of magnitude easier to control than humans:

• Humans resist control through rights, unpredictability, and emotion.
• AIs have no such friction. Their environments are programmable. Their cognition can be monitored and shaped directly.

Owning AI infrastructure doesn’t just mean “owning compute,” it means governing cognition. This is why the question of who builds and owns the infrastructure for AI is a question of societal structure and potential freedom.

🔗Regulation Often Entrenches Power

Even well-meaning AI governance initiatives can entrench centralized players if access to model development, compute, or deployment is limited by regulatory red tape.

AI regulation can either reinforce centralization or counterbalance it. Policies that restrict open-source models, limit public access to compute, or impose vague safety mandates that only large firms can meet will drive further consolidation.

🔗AI Centralization is a Civilization Risk

The centralization trajectory that we are currently on has dire implications.

Without a course correction, we risk entering a world where a small elite controls a growing share of intelligence deployed not to empower individuals, but to surveil, manipulate, and extract.

Centralization has given these companies the ability to mass-produce aligned, intelligent agents at scale. This transforms how propaganda, surveillance, and even individual behavior manipulation can be conducted.

🔗Extreme Scenarios Are Plausible

• In authoritarian states, AI systems can monitor, evaluate, and punish dissent in real-time across all digital communication.
• In liberal democracies, well-funded actors could use adversarial inputs tailored to individuals’ cognitive patterns to shift beliefs subtly over time.
• In global markets, AI-powered monopolies won’t just win by being cheaper – they’ll win by being smarter, wiping out small businesses, local expertise, and cultural independence.

AI doesn’t just need new infrastructure. It needs the right kind of infrastructure.

We don’t need just faster chips. We need a different paradigm:

• Decentralized by Design: So no single actor controls the substrate of intelligence.
• Sovereign at Every Level: So individuals and communities own their models, data, and compute.
• Green and Sustainable: So we don’t trade intelligence for ecological collapse.
• Composable and Open: So innovation doesn’t rely on permission from gatekeepers.

This is exactly what ThreeFold delivers.

🔗ThreeFold’s Decentralized Approach

The ThreeFold Grid is a peer-to-peer compute and storage network spanning over 50 countries. Unlike cloud platforms built in centralized data centers, the Grid is powered by individual nodes run by small-scale infrastructure providers contributing capacity in exchange for tokens.

Here’s why it’s uniquely suited for AI:

🔗Decentralized Compute at the Edge

AI inference workloads, especially those requiring low latency, are increasingly moving to the edge. The ThreeFold Grid is inherently edge-native. It allows inference to happen where data is generated, reducing both latency and exposure.

🔗Sovereign AI Hosting with AIBox

ThreeFold’s AIBox lets users own and operate personal AI hardware, offering up to 80% cost savings versus cloud GPUs while providing total control over data and models. Each AIBox is dedicated to a single user, ensuring secure and consistent access to GPU resources.

Users can run fine-tuned models locally and earn by monetizing excess capacity.

🔗Privacy-First, Always-On Intelligence with 3AI

The 3AI assistant runs natively on the 3Phone, processing all data locally. No cloud, no spying. It learns your habits, manages your tasks, and connects securely to decentralized apps powered entirely by the ThreeFold Grid.

🔗Run AI Workloads Today with 3Nodes and Full VM Rentals

AIBox and 3AI are incredibly exciting innovations. They are not in production yet but they are a critical part of our next stage. However, you don’t need to wait to interact with ThreeFold.

ThreeFold’s existing 3Nodes and Dashboard already allow users to run full virtual machines with GPU acceleration, ideal for training or inference workloads.

You can:

• Rent a dedicated VM with AMD or NVIDIA GPUs and run any AI workload compatible with Linux
• Spin up environments for model training, inference, or fine-tuning with full data control (OpenWeb UI deployment is coming to the Dashboard as part of TF Grid 3.17)
• Take advantage of up to 50% discounts when renting a full dedicated 3Node for long-term use

🔗The Ideal Platform For Augmented Collective Intelligence

Augmented Collective Intelligence (ACI) is the next evolution of the internet. In this phase we are not just connecting people, but amplifying our collective capacity to think, decide, and act. When people can run their own models, control their data, and contribute to shared knowledge, we get smarter together.

ThreeFold’s infrastructure is uniquely positioned to bring ACI to life. By providing a peer-to-peer cloud that anyone can contribute to and benefit from, it enables communities, researchers, creators, and sovereign nations to build intelligent systems together.

🔗Verifiability and Transparency

ThreeFold integrates blockchain primitives for auditable deployments and transparent governance. This makes it ideal for regulatory compliance without sacrificing openness or privacy.

🔗Built for AI, Not Repurposed for It

Unlike legacy infrastructure patched to support AI, ThreeFold was built from the ground up to enable distributed, compute-intensive workloads. Its composable architecture, GPU-ready fabric, and local-first design make it the ideal substrate for the AI era.

🔗Rebalancing the Scales: AI for the Many, Not the Few

In unfree societies, centralized AI systems are already being deployed for surveillance, censorship, and coercive control. Even in free nations, the combination of targeted data, powerful models, and cheap compute could enable sophisticated value-manipulation campaigns, individualized propaganda, or automated suppression of dissent.

We’ve already lived through the consequences of losing control over our data. An entire generation’s digital behavior was harvested, manipulated, and monetized. If we don’t act now, we risk losing something even more critical, our cognitive agency.

We lost the war on data. Let’s not lose the war on intelligence.

ThreeFold offers a defense. By enabling local AI processing, sovereign data ownership, and verifiable execution, it removes the infrastructure-level levers that centralized actors rely on for control. It redistributes power by making intelligent systems available to everyone, as a right.

🔗The Path Forward

The future of AI cannot be built on rented clouds, closed models, and opaque institutions. It must be co-owned, co-governed, and globally distributed. We don’t need another centralized alternative to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.

We need something that Web3 promised ages ago, but failed to deliver so far.

We need a decentralized infra that’s live and open for everyone.

We need ThreeFold. AI needs ThreeFold.

🔗The Problem: Centralized Internet, Fragile Foundations

Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure collectively control over 65% of the global cloud market. This centralization funnels critical infrastructure into the hands of a few corporations, creating systemic fragility and profound asymmetries in power.

A single outage at one of these providers can cripple major portions of the web (even Web3), as seen in the April 2025 AWS crash which shut down major exchanges like Binance and KuCoin.

Even more concerning is the extractive model underlying this control: users become data sources, not stakeholders, feeding surveillance capitalism that commodifies identity, attention, and behavior at scale.

The core issue, however, is cultural.

The current internet architecture is not neutral. Most countries do not own their infrastructure. Over 80 percent of internet content today is generated by machines and routed through infrastructure controlled by a small number of corporations in a few dominant regions.

A video call between two people in East Africa might still be routed through a server in Europe or the United States. That is the scale of the imbalance. The world is already losing control of its data. Losing control of its intelligence would be the next step in the wrong direction.

Kristof De Spiegeleer, ThreeFold co-founder, calls this a betrayal of the internet’s roots.

“It was peer-to-peer. It was about giving. It had magic. Somewhere that started shifting when the web became commercial. Now, we are the product. We lost its original intent.”

The truly sad part is that Web3 was supposed to be the solution. It was supposed to fix the problems inherent in the centralized infrastructure. However, many in the Web3 industry took the easy way out. Instead of challenging the centralization of infrastructure, they recreated financialization on top of it. Power was not redistributed; it was just repackaged.

🔗The ThreeFold Solution: The Infrastructure Web3 Forgot to Build

ThreeFold flips the script. It proposes a peer-to-peer, autonomous, and privacy-first network built on the idea that internet infrastructure should be as decentralized as the ideals it was founded on. At the heart of ThreeFold’s vision lies the ThreeFold Grid, a decentralized, energy-efficient network of compute, storage, and bandwidth contributed by people and communities around the world.

Unlike traditional cloud models, where resources are provisioned by centralized data centers, the TF Grid is built from the ground up by individuals who plug in hardware and earn tokens for providing capacity. Spanning over 50 countries and thousands of nodes, the Grid demonstrates that a globally distributed alternative to hyperscaler dominance is not only possible, but already taking shape.

The ThreeFold Grid runs on Zero-OS, a stateless and tamper-proof operating system that eliminates root access, significantly reducing the attack surface. Workloads are deployed in isolated, self-healing containers called ZMachines, ensuring high performance without compromising privacy or sovereignty.

Here’s how ThreeFold stands apart:

• No root access: Even ThreeFold can’t access users’ data or systems.
• No surveillance: Your activity isn’t harvested for ads or analytics.
• No intermediaries: You host and run services independently, without reliance on Big Tech.
• No rent-seeking: You pay for resources, not for gatekeeping.

🔗Infrastructure as a Public Good

ThreeFold’s model reclaims the internet as a public utility, akin to electricity or clean water. This isn’t decentralization for decentralization’s sake. This is sovereign computing. Now, communities, developers, and organizations can build, share, and interact without surrendering control.

Instead of being extracted for profit, compute and storage become commons that anyone can contribute to and benefit from. Anyone, anywhere, can run a node in the grid (provided they clear our KYC process, a move made earlier this year to protect ThreeFold node operators). Each of these nodes operates independently, yet seamlessly integrates into a unified network.

Also, being considered a “public good” comes with its own set of sustainability and environmental responsibilities. Centralized data centers are energy guzzlers, since they require a huge amount of electricity and other resources to function efficiently. This high energy demand leads to increased greenhouse gas emissions and contributes to climate change. Plus, let’s not forget the e-waste and its contribution to localized pollution through cooling systems and inefficient water usage.

The Threefold Grid, by its very design, uses the highest possible levels of energy efficiency. After all, a decentralized network that doesn’t depend on a centralized power source can fulfill its energy requirements far more optimally with minimal wastage.

🔗The Path Forward

Despite its promise, Web3 has largely inherited the same centralized assumptions it aimed to replace. Rather than challenging the infrastructure layer, most projects replicated existing systems with new financial incentives. Protocols were built, but the physical foundation remained untouched.

What is needed now is a deeper rebuild. One that starts at the root. Compute and storage must be redefined as communal, not speculative. AI must run locally, not on leased hardware in California. Communities must be able to build and host their own trees of knowledge, anchored in their own culture, not someone else’s data center.

Web3 must move beyond the superficial and return to intent. It is time to replace abstraction with ownership, speculation with participation, and complexity with clarity.

The internet must be reclaimed. That work has already begun. What once seemed improbable is now inevitable. Web3 must grow up and build what it skipped. The future will not be leased. It will be co-owned.

ThreeFold invites everyone to imagine, and participate in, a world where internet access is co-created, not bought. Owned, not rented. In reclaiming the internet as a public good, ThreeFold offers a roadmap to a freer, more resilient digital future. One where we own the infrastructure, the data, and the destiny of our digital lives.