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At this year’s ETHDenver, one theme stood out: the importance of fundamentals in Web3. While the market in general was characterized by caution and negative sentiment, the atmosphere around ETHDenver was considerably more positive. While past cycles saw explosive growth driven by hype and speculation, the industry is now maturing, and projects that deliver real-world utility are separating themselves from the noise.
There is a healthy skepticism around web3 and AI, which wasn’t there before. AI in its current form is not a panacea. The days of just bolting AI onto any project are long gone; investors, developers, and users are prioritizing sound fundamentals and tangible utility.
At Auki, we’ve always believed that real-world utility is what will drive long-term success. In this post, we’ll explore how we are working to achieve this and how our business development, partnerships, and incubator are all geared toward driving real-world adoption.
Speculation is out, fundamentals are in. ETHDenver 2025 made it clear: the cycle is back to focusing on fundamentals. - Santeri Aramo, Founder & COO
ETHDenver 2025 underlined its importance as one of the biggest Ethereum events of the year. This year’s edition was characterized by a shift towards practical utility, sustainability and revenue generating projects in place of speculative DePIN plays. In other words, a clear shift to fundamentals:
Fundamentals matter because, without them, projects collapse when hype fades. The 2022-2023 bear market was a stark reminder that many crypto projects lacked real substance—overleveraged DeFi protocols imploded, NFT projects disappeared, and countless tokens lost 90%+ of their value. However, the projects that focused on fundamentals survived and even thrived. This is the foundation that we are building upon.
At Auki, we’re building the protocol for decentralized, collaborative spatial computing. Our focus is on the Auki network, a decentralized machine perception network that enables seamless, real-time collaboration between robots, AI and devices in physical environments.
The potential applications for this technology are vast, there are so many use cases that it can be difficult to get across a simple, bite-size application: the Auki network can power a supermarket, an autonomous warehouse with interoperable robots or a shared, app-free multimedia AR experience. As a result, it would be easy to just focus on the endless possibilities of spatial computing and physical AI, indefinitely.
However, we’re focused on proving the utility of the protocol in the short term with some practical commercial applications. These projects are of course aligned with our longer term goals:
In DePIN, your community is the infrastructure. Without long-term incentives, there is no network. - Santeri Aramo, Founder & COO
Building a strong foundation is just the beginning. Real adoption happens through strategic partnerships, developer support and developing products that meet a need in the market. Here’s how we’re making it happen:
We have chosen to focus on two commercial products to generate revenue and drive adoption: Cactus for retail and app-less navigation for commercial properties. We are actively working with businesses in retail, logistics, and AR-driven consumer experiences. We are coming to the end of our first customer implementation of Cactus and will soon be able to make an announcement. We are also piloting both Cactus and app-less navigation with customers in America, Europe and Asia, so stay tuned for more announcements here in the coming months.
We are also investigating new applications such as privacy-preserving, anonymized in-store analytics, visual product recognition and various implementations of retail focused robots, to name but a few, however we are staying laser-focused on deploying our current solution on the market and proving it’s real-world utility.
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Partnerships are crucial for scaling adoption. That’s why we’ve joined forces with leaders in robotics and enterprise software, ensuring that the Auki network is supported and integrated seamlessly. These collaborations are enabling our technology to make an impact across industries such as construction, logistics, manufacturing, care-giving and beyond.
Currently, the deployment of robots tends to compartmentalize their knowledge, with each robot largely operating independently. However, by enabling them to share and receive information within a spatially mapped environment, we open the door to true collaboration. This not only enhances their ability to work together more effectively but also reduces the cognitive compute load, allowing them to focus more intently on their specific tasks, accelerating development and leading to improvements in efficiency and performance. - Phil Shaw, Head of Robotics
Things are moving very quickly in this space, both in terms of robot and wearable tech integrations. We will be posting an update on the latest developments with devices and robotics in the coming weeks.
To further expand our impact, we’re both supporting projects built on the Auki network through our developer grants program and creating an incubator to support promising early-stage AR and spatial computing projects. By providing funding, resources, and mentorship, we’re accelerating the development of the next generation of decentralized applications built on the Auki network. Some of these will be working in the newly built incubator space in our Level 10 headquarters.
We have just granted our first two developer grants and will be featuring their projects on the blog shortly.
As the crypto industry matures, the projects that will thrive are those that offer real, tangible value. Auki is committed to building an ecosystem where spatial computing, physical AI and blockchain merge to create meaningful, real-world applications.
The lessons from ETHDenver are clear: Fundamentals matter now more than ever. At Auki, we’re not just following this trend—we’ve been leading the charge from the start. Join us as we build the next era of decentralization.
Auki is making the physical world accessible to AI by building the real world web: away for robots and digital devices like smart glasses and phones to browse, navigate, and search physical locations.
70% of the world economy is still tied to physical locations and labor, so making the physical world accessible to AI represents a 3X increase in the TAM of AI in general. Auki's goal is to become the decentralized nervous system of AI in the physical world, providing collaborative spatial reasoning for the next 100bn devices on Earth and beyond.
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