Samani: Web3 Is Dead, DeFi and DePIN Are What's Left

Kyle Samani, co-founder of Multicoin Capital and chairman of the Solana Treasury, posted a blunt verdict on X on June 1: "Web3 is dead. All we have is DeFi and depin." Samani runs Multicoin Capital, one of the earliest and largest institutional backers of Solana, and chairs the treasury vehicle that raised $1.65 billion alongside Galaxy Digital and Jump Crypto in a private placement (per The Block). His sector thesis carries weight in how Solana positions its ecosystem priorities.

The statement is consistent with a broader shift Samani has been articulating since stepping back from daily operations at Multicoin Capital in February 2026 to focus on AI, robotics, and longevity technology. In statements around that departure, Samani described blockchain as primarily a ledger that would reshape finance, while arguing that most of the interesting questions in social and governance applications had either been answered or had failed to attract durable users. He maintained conviction in financial applications including stablecoins, DeFi, and DePIN, per reporting by DeFi Planet.

What Samani's Argument Actually Says

Samani's critique is structural rather than cyclical. The Web3 thesis from 2020 to 2023 held that decentralized applications would displace centralized incumbents across social networks, gaming, creator monetization, and governance. That thesis has not produced platforms with sustained mainstream usage. Samani's position is that the sector ran the experiment and got the answer: decentralization does not by itself produce better social or gaming products that users prefer.

DeFi and DePIN, by contrast, use blockchains for things that blockchains are actually well-suited to do. DeFi replaces or supplements intermediated financial infrastructure with on-chain settlement, automated market makers, and permissionless credit. The demand signal is measurable: Solana's DeFi sector processes billions in weekly volume across lending, trading, and liquid staking. DePIN coordinates physical infrastructure deployment by using token incentives to aggregate hardware contributors who would not otherwise coordinate. The demand signal there is the hardware itself: working networks doing real work.

Readers should weigh his incentive structure when assessing the claim. Multicoin Capital built its portfolio around exactly the two categories Samani is now calling the survivors: the firm backed Helium Network ( HNT$0.683-3.3% ) and Hivemapper ( HONEY$0.00181-0.7% ) as early DePIN bets, led Jito ( JTO$0.568+13.0% )'s $10 million Series A for Solana liquid staking, and anchored marginfi's $3 million DeFi seed round, per public fundraising records. His thesis maps precisely onto the investments he already holds.

Solana's DePIN Stack Is the Proof-of-Concept

If Samani's argument holds, Solana is positioned better than any other chain to benefit. Solana has more DePIN projects than any competing ecosystem, with over 30 active networks running on its infrastructure, according to DePINscan.

Helium Network ( HNT$0.683-3.3% ) is the category's anchor. The network operates more than 900,000 wireless hotspots across 192 countries, providing IoT and mobile connectivity through a token-incentive model. It migrated to Solana in April 2023 specifically to access the chain's transaction throughput and low fees, as Solana Compass covered at the time. The HNT token reflects a market cap of approximately $125 million as of this writing, per live Compass data.

Hivemapper ( HONEY$0.00181-0.7% ) is the DePIN mapping network, compensating drivers who run dashcam hardware that uploads street-level imagery. It recorded 1,272 daily active users as of June 1, per Solana Compass project data. Render Network ( RENDER$1.97-3.4% ) routes GPU rendering jobs through a decentralized network of hardware contributors; the RENDER token connects resource buyers to the network. io.net ( IO$0.169-3.5% ) aggregates over 120,000 GPU workers for AI compute tasks, per the project's public figures, making it the infrastructure layer that sits beneath AI workloads rather than within them.

The Solana Foundation has also formally identified DePIN as a priority category. In a previously published presentation, Foundation contributor Amira Valliani described a "$400M opportunity" in energy grids and AI robotics data collection on Solana's infrastructure. That is attributed opinion, not verified addressable market sizing, but the Foundation's attention to the category predates Samani's tweet.

The Sectors He Left Out

Samani's framing excludes categories that Solana has also invested in building. NFTs, consumer gaming, and social applications are largely absent from his surviving list. He did mention tokenized real-world assets as gaining traction from institutional interest, though he categorized RWAs separately from the DeFi/DePIN binary, per coverage from U.Today.

The omission of consumer applications matters for Solana's longer-term positioning because the chain's developer community has built extensively in those areas. Wallets like Backpack, consumer apps like Dialect, and gaming infrastructure experiments represent real builder effort. Whether Samani's sector triage maps onto where capital actually flows on Solana over the next twelve to eighteen months is an open question.

His departure from day-to-day operations at Multicoin also creates some distance between his stated views and active investment decisions. He described himself as maintaining a partnership role at the firm while shifting personal attention toward AI and robotics. The firms directing capital into Solana DePIN and DeFi going forward may weight his thesis differently than he does as an individual.

What Remains Unsettled

Samani's argument that DeFi and DePIN have product-market fit is grounded in evidence: both categories have measurable activity, real infrastructure, and repeat users. His claim that Web3 is "dead" across social and governance applications is stronger than the evidence supports on its own, given that some consumer crypto products have grown materially on Solana's infrastructure even if none have broken into mainstream adoption at scale.

The Solana Treasury's long-term objective is SOL appreciation, not sector neutrality. Samani's thesis, attributed to him with those incentives visible, is that the path to that appreciation runs through DeFi depth and DePIN network growth rather than consumer application bets. That framing will influence how the Treasury and Multicoin allocate attention, which in turn shapes which projects get institutional visibility inside the ecosystem.

For builders currently working in the categories Samani excluded, his view is a signal about where one influential allocator is looking, not a verdict on the categories themselves.