Deep Dive: Solana DePIN - February 2026

Note: Below is the text-accessible version of this post for visually impaired readers.

Syndica Deep Dive: Solana DePIN - February 2026

Solana DePIN protocols’ revenue stabilized.

In February 2026, Helium, Render, Hivemapper, UpRock, NATIX, XNET, and Geodnet collectively generated $2.4M, a slight 8% decrease from January. Cumulative revenue across tracked protocols crossed $22M since January 2025. $HONEY, $UPT and $NATIX burned for Geodnet, Render, Hivemapper, UpRock, NATIX and Data Credits burned for Helium to determine revenues.

Wireless protocols continued to lead in revenue growth.

Only Helium and XNET delivered over 100% revenue growth from January 2025, while the rest excluding UpRock saw a decline in revenue. $HONEY, $UPT and $NATIX burned for Geodnet, Render, Hivemapper, UpRock and Data Credits burned for Helium to determine revenues. Revenue growth over 1.2k% were removed for better scale.

Deployer rewards continued to trend down since August.

Collectively, Solana DePIN protocols distributed less than $2M in rewards for the first time. Render, io.net, Geodnet, NATIX, Sallar and UpRock.

Part I Wireless

Wireless protocols data offloading hit a new ATH.

In February 2026, Dabba Network, Helium Mobile, and XNET collectively delivered 37k TB of offloaded data, up 12% from January's prior ATH of 33k TB.

Helium Mobile new subscribers continued to cool.

Helium Mobile added just 12k new subscribers in February. The protocol was nominated for Best Mobile Network Infrastructure at the GLOMO Awards and reached 656k sign-ups in total, signaling continued market adoption momentum.

Helium Mobile hotspot deployments held steady in February.

Monthly deployments came in at 2.9k in February, in line with January's figure of 3k. The network now has 127k cumulative hotspots since January 2025.

Helium Mobile offloading hit a new ATH in February.

In February 2026, average daily data offload surged to 101 TB, up 36% from January's 74 TB, while daily offload subscribers rose to 2.5M.

Helium Mobile revenue held above $2M for a second straight month.

Monthly revenue remained at $2.2M in February, matching January's figure and pushing Helium Mobile's cumulative total since January 2025 to $14M.

Offload carriers is slowly taking back share of Helium Mobile revenue in February.

In February 2026, offload carrier fees accounted for 54% of total revenue, flipping back above subscriber fees after the two were roughly equal in January. The continued ramp of Helium's data offload ATH in February drove this rebalancing.

Dabba Network extended its run into February.

Data consumption rose 10% to 34k TB in February, pushing cumulative data consumed to 123k TB since January 2025. New hotspot deployments slowed down at 8k for the month, a 70% decrease, bringing the total network to 109k deployed hotspots.

XNET data offload set a new ATH in February.

In February 2026, XNET's data offload jumped 32% to 107 TB, recovering from January's 8% dip and reaching a new monthly high. The protocol surpassed 100 TB of offload in a month for the first time.

XNET revenue moderated after January's rebound.

In February 2026, XNET generated $3,688 in on-chain revenue, down 28% from January's $5,135.

Part II Mapping and Location

Hivemapper revenue declined sharply in February.

In February 2026, Hivemapper generated $9k in revenue, an 81% drop from January's $47k, as $HONEY burn slowed. The team continued to innovate on the product side, comparing Bee Maps' real-time continuous data to Google Street View and highlighting a new purpose-built Edge AI device for higher-quality data capture.

Hivemapper kilometers mapped pulled back in February.

In February 2026, Hivemapper mapped 8M kilometers, a 53% drop from January's 17M. Cumulative kilometers mapped since January 2025 reached 308M.

The team added real-time features to Bee Maps and continued positioning the network's freshness advantage over legacy mapping solutions.

NATIX's momentum stabilized in February.

NATIX's ecosystem cooled in February as new drivers fell 33% and map data events collected declined by 43%. The protocol continues to expand as a new partnership with Nomadic ML for video data analysis was revealed.

Part III Compute, AI, & Data

Nosana demand continued to decline.

Monthly jobs dipped another 15% to 160k. The protocol continued to expand with a partnership with Alio for agentic AI security on Nosana GPU Cloud.

UpRock revenue remained elevated in February.

In February 2026, $UPT burned generated $33k in revenue from uptime monitoring services, slightly below January's $37k. UpRock ran various campaigns across Asia, driving strong regional engagement.

Render revenue fell below $100k.

In February 2026, Render’s revenue declined 22% to $94k.

Shaga’s Playroll Windows app went live.

Users earn from hours played on Steam games as this helps train AI models for AI gaming. The protocol already attracted a healthy community of gamers on Steam. 317k hours played 76 countries 366 Steam players

Part IV New Protocols

New Protocols: Voyage DataHive

Voyage is a Generative Engine Optimization

DataHive is a decentralized data factory for Finance network and AI-first data protocol AI, a platform that collects, cleans, and labels for AI discovery and trust by enabling real-world web data at scale.

It rewards users knowledge contributions from users to for contributing data that you have scrolled. enhance AI outputs like those from LLMs.

Tapedrive is a decentralized object storage built to retrieve any type of data.

It rewards users for contributing disk/bandwidth/CPU.