peaq

Max Thake says he, Leonard Dorlöchter and Till Wendler began working together in summer 2017. peaq’s own history starts its enterprise blockchain record in 2018, when the team was building for mobility and connected devices rather than selling a Layer 1 token.

A 2019 Audi collaboration exposed a practical obstacle: electric-vehicle users faced separate accounts and closed charging systems. The team interpreted that fragmentation as a machine-infrastructure problem and moved toward reusable device identities, access rules and payments.

Before peaq mainnet, the builders introduced krest on Kusama. It was a canary network where token incentives and machine applications could fail under real economic conditions without placing the intended peaq economy at the same risk.

The financing was conventional even if the product targeted decentralization. In March 2024 peaq announced a US$15 million private round led by Generative Ventures and Borderless Capital; investors ultimately received 34% of genesis allocation categories.

At 09:00 UTC on 2024-11-12, peaq mainnet and PEAQ went live with 32 genesis nodes and 4.2 billion tokens. The launch article said more than 50 DePINs were building and their networks touched over two million devices. That was an ecosystem-reach claim, not an onchain machine count.

The project dates its first actual batch to December 9: 353 Silencio noise sensors. It later reported more than 40,000 machines with peaq IDs before year-end. The distinction matters because choosing a chain, integrating software and continuously using it are separate stages.

The later report did not erase the launch distinction. A machine address proves an onchain identity was created; it does not by itself show continuous sensor output, service revenue or a unique physical device.

The Foundation corrected an earlier label: 4.2 billion was genesis supply, not maximum supply. The live native precompile already returned 4,440,923,715.647734904052922104 PEAQ on September 5, 2026. The published rate starts at 3.5%, falls by one tenth of the rate each year and settles at 1%, so issuance continues under the current runtime.

The table’s 5,667,620,228.64 at the end of year 17 is a projection. The current runtime does not enforce it as a cap, although the Foundation says a later upgrade will add one. Genesis allocation was 34% investors, 21% community, 20% ecosystem and treasury, 11.5% core contributors, 8.5% EoT Labs and 5% network security. Locked and vesting allocations can stake, and newly minted staking rewards are immediately unlocked.

Issuance also directs budgets. The live split at review sent 40% of issuance and fees to validators and delegators and 60% to named pools. A 30%/70% replacement was merged but not yet enacted. Describing the later split as already live would move money on paper before the runtime did.

By the end of 2025, peaq reported 3.35 million machine addresses, 2.67 million human wallets and more than 174 million transactions. These dated figures show the scale claimed by the operator and can be compared with public dashboards; they do not prove that every address is a distinct physical machine producing independent demand.

The code supplies machine IDs, permissions and payment tools. The commercial success of Silencio, MachineX or another DePIN still belongs to that application and its users. A project joining the ecosystem is not revenue, usage or property automatically accruing to PEAQ.

The current governance description leaves the Foundation with veto power during the initial period and management of treasury pools. A separate December 2025 disclosure lists a narrower operational arrangement: six wallet holders publicly listed in addresses whose holders remain unidentified manage network-level incentive pools for the Foundation, and no transfer occurs without a majority decision.

The entities remain separate. peaq Foundation Ltd is incorporated in Cayman; Peaq Network Ltd says it owns and manages portal software from the British Virgin Islands; a project-submitted filing names EoT Labs as primary service provider. Holding PEAQ supports fees, staking and staged governance. The reviewed materials do not attach equity in those entities or title to machines operated by third-party DePINs.