Peaq Network

Polkadot parachain L1 for Machine DePIN (machine identity + M2M payments + data verification). EVM-compatible Substrate L1, Chain ID 3338. Claims 10K TPS now, 500K+ TPS target, $0.00025/tx. Founded 2017 in Berlin by Till Wendler (CEO) and Leonard Dorlöchter (CPO).

The team is IoT/industrial-blockchain veterans, not AI/ML people. Real activity is in environmental sensors, vessel tracking, decentralized WiFi, and social-data scraping — not inference, model serving, or agent infrastructure.

Product

Modular SDK:

• peaq ID — machine DIDs
• peaq Access — RBAC
• peaq Pay — M2M payments
• peaq Verify — data auth

Marketed as "Layer 1 for machines" — coordination + payments substrate, not compute or inference.

Team

• Till Wendler (CEO, ex-Advanced Blockchain AG, Cal State East Bay BA)
• Leonard Dorlöchter (CPO, TU Berlin)
• Max Thake, Julia Ponitzsch, Pavel Fomenko
• Incubated by EoT Labs (their own org)
• Co-developed identity standards with Bosch, Denso, Continental, Airbus, DLR — real industrial pedigree
• Zero AI/ML credentials — the "AI" pitch is positioning, not capability

AI Substance — Thin

• DePAI is narrative (Messari-coined post-Huang CES 2025); peaq positions as "L1 for Physical AI" but no AI runs on peaq
• Teneo Protocol integration (Jan 2026, Agent Console testnet) — Teneo agents settle on peaq but inference happens elsewhere; Teneo itself is mostly a social-data scraping DePIN
• Bosch + Fetch.ai sensor kit — POC stage hackathon demo, not commercial product

Verdict: peaq is substrate for machine-economy plumbing, not a decentralized AI project.

Token

• $0.02114 (May 14, 2026). MCap $44.8M (rank #549). FDV $93.2M
• Circulating 2.12B / Total 4.41B / Max 5.67B
• 97.2% below ATH ($0.7505, Dec 2024)
• 7d +22% (deep small-cap volatility)
• Tokenomics: 26.82% investors, 15.77% team, 16.56% community, 21.13% inflation
• 43%+ of supply to insiders still vesting through 2026-27
• Inflation: 3.5% declining to 1% over ~12 yrs
• Next unlock Jun 12, 2026 (~84.8M PEAQ, 1.9% supply)
• Raised $15M Mar 2024 (Generative Ventures + Borderless co-lead, Animoca, HV Capital, DWF Labs, Spartan)

Recent News (Q4 2025 – May 2026)

• VARA MoU (Oct 2025, GITEX) — Dubai regulator engagement for onchain robotics
• Machine Economy Free Zone (mid-2025) with Pulsar Group; peaq moved HQ to UAE
• Teneo Agent Console launches with peaq integration (Jan 2026)
• MastChain MastNode hardware pre-orders Apr/May 2026, 200-unit first batch shipping June 2026 — peaq's first dedicated hardware DePIN
• Q3 2025 transaction growth: 500% (30K → 150K daily tx)

Traction

The "2M+ devices" number is promotional-aggregate; conservative count is ~8K actively transacting devices on-chain.

Real headline dApps:

• Roam Network (27K users, 178 countries — eSIM/WiFi)
• Teneo (400K nodes, mostly data scraping)
• MastChain (just launching)
• Silencio, migrated mapping projects

$25M tokenized Machine RWAs. No Helium-scale flagship yet.

Critiques

• Standard DePIN inflation overhang — 43% insider vesting + ongoing 2.5% effective inflation vs. thin demand-side burn
• Metric inflation — "2M devices" double-counts nodes (Teneo's social-scraping nodes get counted as "machines")
• Mastercard "partnership" is Start Path accelerator — mentorship, not commercial integration; peaq sometimes blurs this
• Bosch is R&D engagement (XDK110 demo at university hackathon), not Bosch shipping production hardware with peaq inside
• 97% drawdown is the market's verdict on the original thesis premium
• DePAI is repositioned narrative — peaq existed pre-AI-narrative as "Economy of Things"; AI angle was retrofitted

Competitive Positioning

Peaq's only Layer-1-purpose-built-for-DePIN claim is defensible vs. Helium/Hivemapper (app-chains on Solana), Render Network/io-net (GPU), Akash Network (compute), Bittensor (AI subnets).

But this is off-axis from decentralized-AI peers — Peaq competes for "machine-economy substrate" attention, not inference/agent infra.

Recommendation

Track as a call option on "Machine Economy actually emerges" / "Physical AI x crypto rails." Not a fit for the inference-thesis trade. For Venice-pattern peers focus on Aethir, io-net, Render Network, Bittensor. Peaq's catalyst would be a Tesla/Figure/Bosch-class robotics deployment that visibly uses peaq rails — none currently exist.