Indeed, the web2 food delivery industry is one of the best examples of how a middleman operates to make things more difficult for everyone.

This provides an excellent use case for web3 and decentralized physical infrastructure networks; More specifically, by putting web3 at the center of a service used by billions of people around the world. So what makes food deliveries so bad? The answer is simple: Fees.

Consider this: The multi-restaurant food delivery app you use every day may charge up to a 30% fee for their services. This fee is paid by the restaurant, covering things like use of the platform and optionally marketing and promotions.

The problem is that restaurants typically operate on a 2-3% profit margin, which is necessary to cover their extremely high overhead costs. If you’re struggling to avoid bankruptcy, anything that cuts into your profits—for example, a delivery app fee—creates serious losses.

The quick fix is ​​simple: pass these costs on to the buyer. A delivery can cost 20% more than when you dine in, which doesn’t sound like much fun, right?

Luckily, delivery companies are thinking about this, too, and often pressure restaurants to ensure that the prices you see on the app remain consistent with prices in restaurants. This doesn’t do much to solve the original problem, so the result is often prices going up across the board, both on the app and in restaurants.

Of course, users are not happy with these price increases, and rightfully so, because they have to pay a rather disproportionate bill just for some convenience. So, logically, they are reducing their use of delivery apps.

In fact, they’re eating out less, which puts even more pressure on restaurants. The couriers, or what the apps prefer to call their “partners,” aren’t too happy either, because their share of the services isn’t very large.

Coming to the bottom line of this drama, the delivery services themselves… barely make any money. In a bitter struggle for market dominance, companies are pouring billions of dollars into marketing, promotions, discounts and everything else to attract more users.

Indeed, this industry is fighting itself at every step, which is a clear sign of an unsustainable business model. This situation is a great example of how much chaos and distress an intermediary getting between the service provided and the recipient can cause.

Does this mean we should forget to order our Friday pizzas? No. There just needs to be a more sustainable business model behind the application that provides this service. And DePIN is exactly the model the industry needs.

The DePIN-enabled delivery experience for all stakeholders, from restaurants to at-home diners, will be largely the same. You log into the app, browse the menu, order whatever catches your eye, and it’s delivered by an independent courier. The main difference is that you pay less because there isn’t technically a middleman.

We’re talking about a decentralized marketplace here, where restaurants serve real-world products directly to customers. Instead of the huge fee of the Web2 platform, only DePIN’s network fee is paid, and this fee is much lower.

This allows restaurants to offer meals at lower prices without sacrificing profits—if anything is going to increase, profits will probably increase.

The other side of this equation is that users will be able to enjoy the same meals at lower prices. This encourages them to use the service more often, which increases restaurants’ revenues.

Couriers also benefit from this, earning rewards for deliveries through transparent and trustless smart contracts. And of course, in the best web3 traditions, all stakeholders can have a say in how the service works through token-based governance.

This community-driven growth model and lower prices free the project from an inflated marketing budget and allow the service to prove itself on its own.

With the rise of DePIN, the world is at an important juncture—one where web3 has the opportunity to make a real impact on how we do some of our most daily tasks. The food delivery industry provides a perfect use case here, as the unsustainable evil cycle created by Web2 middlemen can be broken with the DePIN model and reinvent itself in a more sustainable way. The opportunity is here and things are brewing—it’s time for big change.