Exclusive: Wi-Fi DePIN XNET announces AT&T partnership
The cell provider is offloading data to XNET’s Wi-Fi network
Jonathan Weiss / Shutterstock.com and Adobe modified by Blockworks
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XNET, a Solana-based project building a decentralized network of Wi-Fi hotspots, has partnered with US telecom giant AT&T. The collaboration will enable AT&T to offload mobile data traffic onto XNET’s network, the team told Lightspeed exclusively.
XNET sells Wi-Fi hotspots that businesses and public spaces can deploy in exchange for XNET token rewards. Together, the patchwork of hotspots makes up a distributed wireless network. XNET partners with cell carriers to offload mobile data onto its hotspots where available, easing network congestion and improving coverage — while the cell carriers pay XNET for the data.
Under the agreement with AT&T, which has been live since September 2024, AT&T wireless customers connect to XNET’s Wi-Fi network where available. AT&T pays XNET in dollars for the data usage, and XNET passes tokens along to its node operators.
According to a Dune dashboard, XNET currently has 688 active nodes, and around 9 million users have connected through its Wi-Fi offloading network. The handoff between AT&T’s coverage and XNET’s Wi-Fi is seamless, and most users have no idea it’s happening, XNET co-founder Richard DeVaul told me. He added that bootstrapping a business like XNET would have been difficult without a token.
“XNET is the poster child for DePIN. We financed millions of dollars of equipment on our network using our token, without conventional equity or debt financing,” DeVaul said in a text.
DeVaul was previously chief technology officer of Google X, Alphabet’s research and development arm focused on technological “moonshots.” He resigned in 2018 following a report that he had allegedly sexually harassed a female job applicant. DeVaul denied the allegations in a comment shared with Blockworks.
XNET has a similar feel to Helium Mobile, a popular DePIN company building a nationwide cellular network through token-incentivized hotspots. But while Helium lets individuals install hotspots at home, marketing lead Chris Banks said that XNET focuses exclusively on B2B services and restricts deployments to “high-value locations to the carriers.”
“We see Helium as a potential customer, not a competitor. But [Helium Mobile CEO Amir Haleem] may have different ideas,” DeVaul said, adding a tongue-wagging emoji.
Updated April 9, 2025 at 1:15 pm ET: Added allegations against DeVaul and his departure from Google X.
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