Kairos Signal · Capacity Telemetry · 6–17 Aug 2026
io.net grew its registered device fleet by 23.9% and delivered no additional compute. Akash barely grew its fleet at all and nearly doubled GPU utilisation. Both facts are invisible from a node count — the metric the category is usually sold on.
Utilisation is a ratio. Almost every DePIN network publishes the numerator — devices active, GPUs hired, cores in use — because it grows. The denominator, capacity actually registered to the network, is what turns that into a rate, and it is rarely exposed and almost never archived. Without it you can watch supply climb forever and never learn whether anyone is renting it.
We hold both halves, timestamped, sampled roughly hourly since 6 August. That makes one question answerable: is this network adding capacity faster than demand absorbs it?
io.net added 526 devices and produced no additional output. Compute-hours served per day sat at 28,185 across the first three days of the window and 28,195 across the last three — a change of one part in three thousand — while the fleet behind it grew by nearly a quarter. Active devices fell 3.4%. Running clusters fell 37.9%.
Plotted as utilisation, the two networks trade places. io.net enters the window as the better-used network and leaves it as the worse-used one.
Akash's series begins 9 August, when both halves of its capacity pair start arriving from the same endpoint. Pairing its earlier CPU reading against the later denominator would have shown 15.9% instead of 20.6% — the same direction, a different level — so only the provenance-matched pair is plotted.
The same io.net window, with the two halves indexed to 6 August. The gap between the lines is the overcapacity: fleet growth that demand never met.
Divergence is supply growth minus demand growth, in percentage points. Positive means capacity is arriving faster than it is being used.
| Network | Resource | Utilisation | Supply | Demand | Divergence | Days |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| io.net | Devices | 57.3% → 44.6% | +23.93% | −3.43% | +27.36 | 11.0 |
| Akash | CPU cores | 20.6% → 28.0% | −6.82% | +26.93% | −33.76 | 8.0 |
| Akash | Memory | 14.9% → 24.7% | −7.19% | +53.73% | −60.92 | 8.0 |
| Akash | GPUs | 31.6% → 61.2% | −5.20% | +83.33% | −88.54 | 8.0 |
Four pairs, two networks. That is the honest extent of it: 181 networks were scanned for this window and only these two publish both halves often enough to measure change. Coverage is limited by what networks disclose, not by what we collect.