A consensus mechanism that cryptographically verifies that a hardware node is genuinely providing the coverage or service it claims, before distributing rewards.
Originally pioneered by Helium for wireless coverage, PoC has inspired analogous mechanisms across DePIN: Proof of Location (geodnet/RTK), Proof of Rendering (Render), and Proof of Storage (Filecoin's PoRep/PoSt). The key challenge is making attestation Sybil-resistant — an operator should not be able to fake coverage by running software-only validators.