In this solo YouTube deep‑dive, Crypto Mason (Mason Versluis) introduces and evaluates IO (io.net), a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) that creates an “Internet of GPUs.” He explains his personal investment alongside co‑investor Megan and sets the premise of assessing whether IO can become a top‑20 crypto project. Mason outlines the tokenomics (800 M max supply, current price ~$2.73, listings on Binance, Bybit, Gate.io, KuCoin, Solana DEXs) and describes the core use‑case: pooling GPU resources for AI workloads, with payments and rewards in the IO token via instant Solana transactions. He highlights the project’s narrative of competing with cloud providers like Azure, emphasizing claimed cost savings, speed, and scalability. The video walks through key partners (Solana, Aptos, Render), notable investors (Solana Ventures, Multicoin Capital, angel investors such as Anatoly Yakovenko, Yat Siu, and US Senator Max Baucus), and a team drawn from Binance, Amazon, Avalanche Labs, etc. Mason presents on‑chain metrics from Eli5DeFi – $1.1 M cumulative network earnings, 8.86 % GPU utilization, ~1 M unverified GPUs, ~300 k verified, ~27 k cluster‑ready – and compares IO’s performance against Akash Network and Helium, showing a clear lead. He demos the product suite (IO Cloud, IO Worker, IO Explorer, IO ID) and showcases an AI art generator (BC8.AI) powered by the network. Throughout, he expresses strong bullish sentiment, citing a personal entry price of $2.30 and a target of $4.60 for a potential 2× return, while reminding viewers it is not financial advice. The video concludes with standard calls to action (likes, Discord, giveaway) and a brief reflection on researching DePIN projects.
Chapters
What is up? I am Crypto Mason and welcome back to the Crypto Mason YouTube channel. Shout out to the Gold Squad. We look for gold in every single aspect of our lives and we always find it. Now today we have another deep dive into a project that me and Megan just put some money into actually called IO. Now this is a DePIN project, decentralized physical infrastructure network, uh, which is one of the hugest narratives I've seen buzzing right now. There's so many DePIN projects, uh, coming out, but this was one that recently launched, and this is one that we are invested in personally. Okay, so IO, let's get straight into it. Make sure you drop a like and comment on the video, uh, 500 likes on this video, uh, and we will give away 100 XRP to one of you guys inside of our free Discord. Now here's the token, right? So 7 days, uh, 19%, it's at $2.73. There's only 800 million of them, okay? As you can see on the side here, 800 million max supply. Now we're going to talk about what the token does, what this even is, what is io.net. Uh, they have a very cool domain, by the way, io.net. The ticker is IO. It is built on Solana, and they do have some exchange listings, right? They were listed on Binance right off the bat, which is pretty crazy. They also have Bybit, Gate.io, KuCoin, and some of the other decentralized ones as well. They do have— okay, and for Solana, so they're not on Uniswap. You got to go buy it on, uh, on the Solana DEXs. Okay. Let's get into it right away. We see that they do have a behemoth of a Twitter, right? Lots of followers. This is a good sign. 155 people that I follow, uh, and respect, because anyone I'm clicking follow on, I'm clicking it for a reason, right? 155 of them follow this project as well. So let's get into their website here. Okay, so this is io.net. Uh, and they're going with this internet of GPUs narrative, which a lot of projects are trying to do. And we're going to evaluate whether IO.NET, uh, is one that you should watch for this narrative. Uh, I believe it is, and we'll show you why. Okay, so this is developed for large-scale AI startups. So this is GPU power. If you don't understand what GPU power is, Basically all of the AI that's running right now needs extreme amounts of GPU power, processing graphics cards and these processing units. Okay. What this does is it pools people's GPU together and then you can use it, right? And you pay in their token. So they have instant payments on Solana, right? So this is the use case The main use case of the token is to reward people for providing GPU, but also people can pay for the GPU usage. Okay, so they actually compare themselves to Azure right here and they're just knocking it out of the park on, on, on competing with Azure. Okay. Unmatched pricing, unrivaled speed, unmatched scalability. You can see you can save basically 52% on the monthly costs, which is very, very crazy. They have 100 times more GPUs than major competitors, uh, best-in-class chips, basically the just the best global GPU access, okay? 138+ countries. Now check out the partners here because we're going to look at their team, um, and their investors and their partners. But their main 3 partners are Solana itself, right? Aptos, which is another huge layer 1, and Render, right? Which is also, if you look into Render Network, this is one of the biggest GPU narrative projects, right? Like everyone is trying to be the next Nvidia and all of this, like because we saw crazy price action with Nvidia and they— Nvidia pulled the greatest chess moves of all time to be this whole huge big dog in the GPU space, uh, but they have these three as partners. And wait until you see the investors actually and the, the board on this one and the team. So basically you connect, monitor, and earn on your worker. So if you want to turn your GPU into a money-making machine, that's what you do with this, right? So that is, uh, on the side of someone who actually wants to make money with this. You guys can see right here, um, the total network earnings is at $1.1 million. Okay, uh, these are the cumulative earnings from IONET's users, which is insane. So this project has already made people who are providing GPU over a million dollars. It's absolutely insane. Uh, they have an 8.86% utilization rate on GPU, and they And there's their CPU stats as well. This is from Eli5DeFi. You can also see IO.NET versus Akash and Helium. You can see they are the light blue line right here, right? So absolutely slaughtering Akash Network and, you know, very much competing with Helium. Right here. And you can see, you know, they were in April and May, uh, all the way up until June, they've been way ahead of Helium. And we know Helium to be one of the giants in that type of space, right? The, the GPU-style space. Uh, this is a huge new narrative that's coming and it's brewing and it's deep in, and you need to watch it in my opinion. So they have this Explorer. We're gonna show you the app as well. right? Like when you sign in, the products they actually have. But before we do that, and by the way, they do have some awesome docs as well if you want to like really dive into what they're doing. Um, because a lot of this stuff is super technical. We're not going to get technical. We're looking at this, uh, from the standpoint of can IO.NET actually grow into a top, you know, 20 project? That's what I'm looking for. So here's the team, right? This is the team. You've got people from huge companies— Binance, Capital One, uh, Amazon, Avalanche Labs. It's a stacked team, and they even have some stacked investors here, okay? So Solana Ventures— so Solana itself decided that it was a good idea to put their own money into IO. You also have Multicoin, which is huge, okay? and maybe some other names like Sandbox, Aptos, Animoca, some other huge names on here that we, we do recognize. Uh, and these are the usual culprits, right? Like, these are the usual behemoths that are funding the next big project, right? So if we continue down, one of the most interesting things in my opinion is the amount of angel investors from other crypto projects, right? You have Anatoly, or Toly on Twitter, from Solana Labs, right? This guy is absolutely massive in the Solana space. He's literally like one of the founders of Solana, is invested with his own money into this project. You also have Yat Siu, not sure how to pronounce that, Animoca Brands, right? You've got two guys from Aptos You've got a guy from Sandbox putting their own money here. Uh, it also seems like right here, I don't know who this guy is, but Max Baucus, um, he's a, a US senator, is on their board of advisors as well, which is pretty crazy. So Stack team, right? If we get into the actual app right here, this is what it looks like when you go in, right? On the, on the top left, you guys can see They have IO Cloud, IO Worker, IO Explorer, uh, IO ID, I believe. Um, yeah, IO ID right there. And they have, um, what else do they have? Hold on. IO Cloud and IO Coin. And the Coin one just links off to their CoinMarketCap. Uh, and then they also have BC8.AI, which I believe is, yeah, this is powered by I/O, and this is actually a— look, some of these art, this art is crazy. Uh, I believe this is an AI art generator that actually utilizes their GPT. Yes, so you can generate stuff. It's kind of like DALL-E 3, right? Um, but you know, they have all this GPT— or sorry, this GPU. Uh, why not you know, build some kind of cool, uh, AI app. So they also link off to that, but they have the IO Cloud, right? This is where you deploy your clusters from, uh, so you can deploy a MegaRay, an array currently. So they're working on these other ones, Unreal Engine 5, um, Kubernetes as well, uh, and you know, this is the type of stuff that I really— my knowledge starts to dwindle on on what these things actually are, but the— I understand the basis of it, which is you provide GPU, you get paid to provide your GPU, other people pay you to utilize your GPU, and it's like this new internet of GPU. So a shared connected internet of GPU. Now if you go to I/O worker, this is actually how you connect new workers. Um, so actually this is where you would connect your GPU, I believe, right? So you can choose and get started on the process, and you can also view your earnings and rewards right here. So this is working, real working products, bro. This is what I like to see, real working products, right? Some of these projects are rolling around with tokens being launched and nothing is even useful. I like to see the real use cases. IONET also has their Explorer right here. So currently, um, you guys can see the, the RTX 4090 is at the top of their list. So this is their, their, um, Explorer. So you can see, you know, everything that's happening. So they have a million unverified GPUs, they have almost 300,000 verified ones, and 27,000 cluster ready. Okay, so, and then you can see the actual geo distribution. Uh, so right now it's mostly United States, obviously, and over here. Okay, so this, you can see that on the map. Um, very cool stuff. You can also view block rewards, so you can see, uh, you know, the blockchain that they have. And then network map, you can actually go into a more in-depth map if you want to go view your city or whatever, you can see if there's anyone doing this from your city. You can view the clusters right here. As I said before, $1.1 million in network earnings, uh, just today already. $3,600 in cluster payments have went out, okay? And was a big day on July 3rd, uh, $8K, $8,000. Very crazy stuff. Workers right here, a worker tab as well, and then inferences tab. Okay, so that's their Explorer. Uh, the ID is just setting up your profile, and then the coin, as we said, just links off to their coin, which is right here. So I am ultimately very bullish on IO, right? And if we look at like the 1-year chart, you can see, you know, since it just launched, it had that big launch pump that every single coin usually has. and then it corrects and finds its like working value, its active value. And we're at $2.7 right now, but this thing easily was up at $5. Um, our personal buy-in is like $2.3, so you know, if it goes to $4.6, we've got a double on our hands. Uh, no financial advice, obviously. You know, this actually has a use case, which is cool. So if you want to actually use io.net, you can use it with token. Uh, but that is all we've got. Thank you to io.net, uh, for partnering with us on this deep dive. I love doing these deep dives and actually teaching you guys and trying to educate about how to even do research into a project, but also about the very unique projects that are coming out, especially in DePIN. There's so many. But that is all we've got. Drop a like and comment, join the Gold Squad Discord, uh, and Goodbye.
