YOM launches Beta Mainnet and 19,000-cell tower cloud gaming roadmap

YOM’s launch addresses the single biggest hurdle in cloud gaming: the high marginal cost of centralized GPU instances. By moving rendering to the extreme edge—including residential hardware and local cell towers—the protocol theoretically achieves the sub-10ms response times necessary for competitive play while undercutting incumbents like AWS on price. This marks a significant shift in the streaming infrastructure landscape, where decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) are evolving from niche crypto experiments into enterprise-grade connectivity layers. Industry stakeholders should monitor the upcoming 19,000 cell tower rollout as a benchmark for whether peer-to-peer networks can maintain the service level agreements required by major gaming and 3D digital twin studios.

The broader DePIN sector has seen substantial maturation in 2026, with the total market capitalization for decentralized infrastructure projects reaching approximately $9.4 billion as of April 2026, per KuCoin reporting. This surge is driven by a shift from speculative token emissions toward utility-driven revenue. In January 2026 alone, leading compute and storage networks generated $150 million in on-chain revenue, marking an 800% year-over-year increase. This environment has allowed specialized protocols like YOM to differentiate themselves from general-purpose providers such as Akash Network or the creative-focused Render Network by targeting the high-concurrency, real-time demands of the $200 billion gaming industry.

Technical scalability remains the primary battlefield for these decentralized networks. YOM's reliance on the Avalanche ecosystem coincides with the 'Avalanche9000' and 'Etna' upgrades activated between late 2024 and mid-2026, which reduced the cost of launching sovereign L1 blockchains by over 99%, per Eco and the Avalanche Foundation. By leveraging these upgrades, YOM can transition from a shared execution environment to a dedicated chain to stabilize transaction costs for micropayments. Concurrently, competitive activity in the GPU space has intensified; per Phemex, Render Network began adding 60,000 GPUs in early 2026 to meet generative AI demand, highlighting a tightening global supply of distributed compute capacity that YOM must navigate as it scales its gaming-centric node base.