There is a big news in the DePIN track recently that it is underestimated! @Impossible_Cloud (ICN) recently received strategic investment from NGP Capital, and its valuation soared to 470 million US dollars. You know, NGP Capital is an early investor in Helium and Xiaomi. The question is, how did ICN get such a high valuation? What is so unique about this project that claims to subvert AWS? This article will dissect the technical business logic from all aspects:

1) The traditional cloud computing market is monopolized by AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, forming a "new centralization" - data, computing, and network resources are all controlled by a few companies. This directly leads to many problems:

1. "Platform tax" is getting higher and higher: giants increase service prices year by year, and enterprises are forced to accept rising cloud costs;

2. Vendor lock-in is getting deeper and deeper: Once the business runs on a certain cloud, the migration cost is high and users can hardly get out;

3. Data sovereignty no longer belongs to the enterprise: your data is actually stored on someone else’s server, and privacy and security are completely dependent on the platform.

Simply put, ICN attempts to build a decentralized cloud infrastructure network to allow enterprises to regain data sovereignty, reduce costs and avoid vendor lock-in. This is also the core value proposition of DePIN - using blockchain technology architecture and Tokenomics to reconstruct traditional physical infrastructure and take back control from centralized hegemony.

2) How to do it specifically? ICN's technical architecture looks complicated at first glance, but in layman's terms, it is to split the traditional integrated cloud service into a three-layer "checks and balances" system:

1. Hardware Layer: Equivalent to the "infrastructure workers" of cloud services, global hardware providers (HPs) contribute enterprise-level hardware equipment, rather than ordinary PCs or idle computing power. This is critical because enterprise customers will not put their core business on unstable consumer-level hardware. This model allows ICN to theoretically aggregate more computing power than the infrastructure accumulated by AWS and Google in the past 15-20 years, just like the impact of the sharing economy on the hotel industry;

2. Service Layer: Equivalent to the "application developers" of cloud services, service providers (SPs) build various cloud products on top of hardware resources. Using the metaphor of Lego blocks, this layer emphasizes composability, reorganizing the infrastructure like building blocks to generate more innovative services;

3. Monitoring Layer: Equivalent to the "independent referee" of cloud services, the SLA Oracle nodes (SLA-ONs) are responsible for monitoring and verifying the quality of service. This layer directly solves the "evil verification" problem commonly faced by DePIN projects - how to ensure that the hardware actually provides the claimed performance? Traditional DePIN basically relies on "trust", while ICN introduces a verifiable proof mechanism.

The three layers are coordinated through the ICN Protocol (ICNP), with market-based pricing and automatic execution of penalties and rewards, forming a self-regulating ecosystem.

Compared with storage-based DePINs such as Filecoin and Arweave, which generally rely on "trust" to solve verification problems, ICN's three-tier decentralized architecture is equivalent to installing an "anti-cheating system" on cloud services, which can solve the inherent pain points of DePIN.

3) Unlike many blockchain projects that first issue coins and then implement the roadmap, ICN has gone the other way and chosen to implement business first and increase revenue. According to statistics disclosed by the project party, the project already has more than 1,000 European and American corporate customers, with annual revenue exceeding US$5 million, a growth rate of 2,000%, and the contracted ARR is expected to reach US$32.7 million by the end of 2025.

ICN's business strategy is also quite clever. It uses "storage" as a starting point and focuses on serving B2B corporate customers. Why storage? Because once corporate data exists on a certain platform, it will naturally form "data gravity", and subsequent computing and network services will also migrate to it.

This approach, which targets corporate customers with strong actual willingness to pay and stable demand, enables ICN to establish a stable cash flow instead of relying on burning investors' money to survive.

4) What is more worth mentioning is that its Tokenomics also perfectly fits its business logic and appears to be relatively pragmatic.

1. Staking mechanism: Hardware providers must stake ICNT to access the network, which is equivalent to a "deposit" to ensure service quality and prevent malicious behavior; 2. Payment medium: Service providers use ICNT to purchase resources and create real demand; 3. Reward tool: Oracle nodes and hardware providers receive ICNT rewards for their contributions.

This design makes tokens the "blood" of the network rather than a speculative tool, and their value comes from actual business scale rather than hype.

Unlike most DePIN projects that rely on continuous high inflation subsidies to attract participants, ICN's Tokenomics follows the growth of demand and will not fall into the vicious cycle of "mining-selling-crash". It should be said that this sustainability has reference significance for the entire DePIN track.

Finally, I would like to add that the ICN team has a very strong European and American background:

Co-founder Dr. KaiWawrzinek founded and indirectly listed Goodgame Studios on Nasdaq; the core members of the team are experienced in the fields of games and cloud storage, and the CTO also owns storage-related patents; the project has received US$18 million in financing, and investors span Web3 and traditional fields.

As an early investor in Helium and Xiaomi, NGP Capital, a top institution backed by Nokia and managing US$1.6 billion, has entered the market, which is a strong endorsement of ICN's development prospects.

above.

According to market forecasts, the global cloud infrastructure market has an annual revenue of approximately US$313 billion and is expected to reach US$837.97 billion by 2034. ICN's goal is to become the "AWS of Web3", and even if it only gets a small part of the market, the business opportunities can be imagined.

However, in my opinion, ICN represents the outpost of Web3 technology's penetration into the core IT systems of enterprises. What is meaningful is that ICN, a project that pragmatically integrates the advantages of Web2 and Web3, is opening up a more feasible path for the enterprise-level application of blockchain technology.