Founder of JDI, the Hong Kong manufacturing and venture group behind much of the world's DePIN hardware.
Yiming Wang is joining Forked.gg as an advisor. He is the founder of JDI, which is two businesses stapled together in a way almost nobody else has pulled off: a manufacturer that moves hardware out of Shenzhen to the rest of the world, and a venture fund that backs the networks that hardware runs on. If you have held a DePIN device in your hands in the last few years, there is a decent chance it came through his supply chain.
Who he is
In 2021 he made a call most of the industry was not ready to make. He put JDI fully behind Helium, back when a wireless network assembled out of hotspots in strangers' apartments still sounded like a bar bet. JDI's Bobber and Bobcat line went on to become the largest supplier of Helium hotspots in the world, shipping them by the hundreds of thousands and taking a serious share of the network. That buildout is a large part of why Helium became the reference point everyone in this sector still argues about.
On the investment side, JDI Ventures runs a reported $200M portfolio pointed squarely at decentralized physical infrastructure. GEODNET, DIMO, Helium Mobile, Hivemapper, MetaBlox, PowerPod, UXUY and U2U Network are all in it. Yiming co-authored the 2024 DePIN Report that much of the sector now quotes back at each other. He is widely described as the most prominent Chinese figure in DePIN, though he spent most of that run working well out of public view.
Forked.gg is a node network. The software works and the fleet earns. Our hardest unsolved problem is the physical one: getting nodes into real homes, in volume, without the economics falling apart on the way. Yiming has done exactly that, at a scale nobody else in this sector has matched.
What he brings
There is a failure mode we have watched hit good projects over and over. The protocol is sound, the token model holds up on paper, and then the network never physically arrives, because manufacturing, freight, customs, support and unit economics turn out to be the actual hard part. Yiming lives in that part of the problem. He knows what a device costs to build, what it costs to land in a given country, what breaks in the first ninety days, and what a node has to earn before an ordinary person will keep it plugged in.
He also brings the other side of the table. Having someone who has underwritten a shelf full of DePIN networks look hard at our node economics tells us more than any amount of internal modelling can. He has seen which of these designs kept paying and which ran dry, and he is now looking hard at ours.
What comes next
The first thing we want from him is a cold look at how a Forked node actually gets into someone's hands and what it earns once it is there. We will share what we can as that work firms up. For now, if you see him in the community, say hello.
Welcome aboard, Yiming.