Why crypto's best infrastructure companies stopped looking like crypto?

Crypto infrastructure companies are following the historical pattern of other infrastructure sectors—where raw capacity commoditizes and profits shift to service providers built on top. Several DePIN (decentralized physical infrastructure) companies, including Storj, recently restructured or separated from their token components to operate as traditional businesses, signaling that the original model of incentivizing users to crowdsource hardware and bandwidth is failing. The winners in this cycle, as demonstrated by AWS's dominance in cloud, are the high-margin service companies that build on commoditized infrastructure rather than the infrastructure providers themselves.