In Brief
Sylvan Zhang, Co-founder of Parasail, lays out the missing piece in scaling DePIN and decentralized AI: trust. While DePIN projects promise verifiable, decentralized infrastructure, the off-chain components — where real-world services are delivered — remain opaque and unverifiable. Paracel introduces trustless service verification and SLA enforcement as critical infrastructure to unlock mass adoption. With integrations across Filecoin, Fluence, and SwanChain, Zhang outlines a clear path to more secure, transparent, and scalable decentralized infrastructure.
Sylvan Zhang: Trustless Infrastructure is the Key to DePIN at Scale
Parasail’s mission is clear: solve the trust bottleneck that limits adoption across DePIN and decentralized AI. According to Sylvan, while DePIN is built onchain, the service layer is often offchain — and unverifiable.
“Every DePIN transaction may be onchain, but you still have to trust that the service behind it was delivered”
That’s the gap Parasail is closing: creating onchain service verification and enforceable SLA contracts to make DePIN infrastructure reliable enough for real-world clients.
The Challenge: DePIN’s Offchain Blindspot
DePIN is growing fast, with a wide range of protocols providing storage, compute, bandwidth, and more. But there’s a systemic issue:
• Onchain: trustless by design.
• Offchain: unverifiable, inconsistent, and often unaccountable.
For example, if an AI protocol pays to run training jobs on decentralized GPUs, there’s no reliable, standardized way to prove the job was actually completed as promised.
Without enforcement, SLAs are meaningless — and trust is lost.
The Solution: Verifiability + Accountability
Parasail introduces a trustless service layer through three core innovations:
Onchain Service Verification
Key performance data (uptime, latency, throughput) is pushed onchain, making it visible not just to clients — but to the entire ecosystem.
SLA Enforcement via Delegation
Assets are staked as enforceable collateral. In case of service failure, they can be slashed or redirected for compensation.
Delegation Pools
Providers and external delegators can contribute capital. This reduces barriers for hardware providers while securing the network at scale.
Together, these mechanisms transform DePIN from “best effort” to verifiable and accountable infrastructure.
Case Studies: Filecoin, Fluence, SwanChain
Paracel is already live with some of the largest names in DePIN:
Filecoin
• Activated delegation to expand liquidity access for storage providers
• Enabled custom SLA classes beyond Filecoin’s native proof-of-replication
• Facilitated DeFi integrations and external liquidity onboarding
Fluence
• Secured over $6M in FLT token stake
• Delegation spread across 30+ compute providers
• Represents ~50% of onchain commitment for Fluence
SwanChain
• Deep integration into SLA flow and token economy
• Transparent, onchain enforcement of provider obligations
• Fee generation through verified usage
These examples show Paracel’s model is working in production, enabling better transparency, more capital efficiency, and scalable trust.
Why This Matters
“Adoption isn’t blocked by demand. It’s blocked by trust”
Zhang argues that mass adoption of DePIN and decentralized AI depends on removing this trust bottleneck. Without enforceable guarantees, clients — especially enterprise ones — won’t commit infrastructure to the network.
Parasail’s approach unlocks:
• Institutional-level confidence
• More predictable service quality
• Permissionless participation via delegation
And ultimately, this creates the conditions for DePIN to move from early adopters to real-world infrastructure use at scale.
