Exclusive: Wi-Fi DePIN XNET announces AT&T partnership

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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.