Personal Data Asset Network for the AI Era

Transcript

Since the moment we have this crypto industry and we have Bitcoin, we've been quite fascinated by mining power and GPUs and ASIC miners. And in recent years as AI is gaining more and more attention, we started to, you know, be obsessed with power contracts, um with chips, and with new kinds of computing power. So, I think in today's talk, I want to talk to you about data, not the large models, not the computing power, but we think data is a new mining and a new resource for the next decades of years.

The thesis statement I'm giving today is data is the new compute. Yet, billions of data are locked in individual devices and to be unlocked by data giants in the next few years. So, let us start with something everyone already has, all right? So, then imagine this is my phone. And obviously I have Uber, Bookings, Airbnb, a lot of apps in there. And in this phone, I may have 9 years of shopping records with thousands of orders. I may have Uber or um driver orders, the ride hailing stuff for the past 6 years, over 800 trips.

I have food deliveries, I have travel bookings, I made a lot of trips to different crypto conferences, I have all those kind of things. Now, the question is, what should I do with this data? These are histories that already exist and I don't need to be generated as a new figure to the society. So, please understand that these data are containing a lot of value to business. For example, this behavioral data tells a very illustrative figure of myself. The shopping history can tells the business owners about my brand loyalty and my price sensitivity.

My riding history will show where I live in and where I work at. The food delivery showed my routines. The travel bookings showed my flight my favorite flight airlines and also how much I will spend on a single trip. So, the current issue is we see this marketing and pricing teams, they spend a lot of time trying to make guesses or they would buy segments from the market or sometimes they even have to mimic the look-alikes to guess my behavior.

The bitter truth is while there are already years of observed real data and behavior which can definitely beat any audience segments, why cannot people buy and sell this data directly? firstly, why does this matter at this precise moment? We think that data also scales like compute. What does it actually mean? It means that in times of AI, we learned that the the performance of models improve as you add on to more compute and data. So, that is called the scaling law and every addition always improves a little margin to it or the little less

every time, but the curves always keeps rising. The DeepMind Chinchilla work showed already that in order to keep improving the performance of the model, the data have to grow in step with uh the compute power as well. And therefore, to train these models efficiently, you will always need more data. And this is not just about chatbots and language models. The Meta research also show similar patterns when it comes to recommender systems which are the engines that decides what you see, what you're offered, and at what price it is on a daily basis.

So, in real-life tests that they already showed a about 12% lift in online samples, and this is a huge improvement. And therefore, there is a bridge, right? The same thing, the same law that drives AI labs in the past is now driving every single consumer business. Basically, every consumer business that recommends, that targets, and that prices can benefit from having more data to have better results. So, but if you compare between these two inputs, if you compare between the compute and the data, you will see things very differently.

For compute, you already have a mature market. You can literally rent a GPU at an hourly rate, where you have prices publicly, you have standard units, maybe you can potentially rent from a few competing suppliers, right? But for data, especially behavioral data, there's no such functioning market. Every data is locked in your own phones or on different platforms. And literally, the sarcastic fact is that there's no possible way for any business to legally upload and acquire to user historical data without violating the data privacy laws.

And therefore, this can only happen from the user side themselves. What the opportunity What's the opportunity we see here is not just about having more data, but we see that you have to collect this data in a clean and verified and authorized way. And this is something Data Dancers mission to do. Then people may ask, do we really have such a strong demand to this? Well, we say yes, because if you look at the retail media that they plan to spend around $200 billion on advertisements that are built with first-hand purchase data. And this is a number that shows how they value knowing what people actually have to buy.

In contrast, the supply is shrinking. The Apple's own survey of iPhone users shows that only 35% of users would give consent to cross-app tracking of their data on their phones. For whatever reasons, you don't have to use data at all. So, in short, retailers, travel and hotels, consumer brands, food deliveries, local services, they all are willing to pay to get this data. There is a very strong demand, but a constant denial of access channels.

This is also not just about shopping, right? We basically categorize personal data into 10 categories, and each of these are with buyers. For example, you can have consumer data going to brands and retailers, you can have financial data going to banks and lenders, have location data, I don't know, to property owners or sellers and and supply chains. You can have skills data to recruiters. You can also have health data to insurance and research or even web stream native data to crypto apps. So, each of these 10 categories represent existing demands and channels for this data.

The other part besides business is that the data can also flow to AI. And think about it as you think of a cookies on web service. So, for now, on a browser, you click on certain items, and your browser would collect it with cookies, and then the website remembers you. However, this data is only retained by the website. And in AI times, things work very differently. The Data Dance wallet allows for one-tap collection of your historical data, and you only need to authorize that to your AI assistants and agents. And then, your AI assistants and agents can understand you instead of a guessing.

So, cookies in the past in web 2.0 times that websites remember you while authorized data with Data Dance lets AI understand you, and the nice part of this is your data is no longer retained by the website or platform, but is always under your control. Now, I understand that there is a trend of agentic payment activities and you know, real-time data generated by AI activities, especially proposed and populated by Coinbase Ventures and Linux Foundation, right? And we definitely understand this is real value, of course. But kindly note at scale that there are already a lot of historical data that has a storage of over 8 or 9 years, while the AI

activities are only emerging for less than a year to go. So, I think this is very important because these years of historical data per account weighs heavily against roughly 1 year of agent payments. Another comment here is that agent generated data accrues to AI companies such as ChatGPT first, and Data Dance doesn't intend to compete against them. We prefer to focus and prioritize the far larger in-stock data, which we believe are held by users that contains much, much more value.

So, if there is demand and supply already, then why nobody connects them together, right? Because we claim this is not just about the rails. The difficulty relies with the ground game because this is a costly and extensive labor work that needs to be done. A user has to upload their Sorry, the data bef- after exporting it from different apps. And then, the wallet, Data dance have to verify this data authentic and owned by the users themselves. They have to screen out the frauds. They have to clean the data to make sure this is something the buyer can actually use.

And they have to license it to consent to record the consent for every single actions. So, this work is slow and costly and that is precisely the mode. Now, I want to be very clear in here. I don't think we're trying to talk about the disruptive technology in this speech. I'm not saying that we're building the best data protocol. In fact, any skillful developer may build a pretty good, you know, data protocol in four or five months. And any good data protocol may be forked easily, right? I think the argument we're making here is that in the past nine months we're able to onboard a lot of users to have active people who contribute their historical data to our platform. And 400,000 users is a milestone we have achieved.

We didn't do this alone and acquire users one by one. We have very strong acquisition channels of eight of Feedback, of Meet48, of OffGrid, of Tattoo Life. And all of these people who have resources and networks of fans, of AI idols, of entertainment's needs, of premium lifestyles contribute their historical data with users consent to us. And this is the grand game at scale we are running. The next thing I want to talk about is that I want to be very accurate about what we actually put on chain and what we do not. So, I don't think that we're putting everything on chain simply because that is not necessary. And by the way, writing your orders and where

you live on chain, this is not ownership. This is permanent leak of your personal data. What we burning on chain is simply the activity. Basically, who have been paid for what amount by giving out what kind of data to whom. And this is the record that needs to be made on chain. And we believe this is the right use of on chain ledgers in together with off chain activities. So, if you are someone who sees this deal, what you can see on chain is a signature and the new key hash, but you're not going to see the wallet address and therefore not leaking all your activities on chain.

Um it's very important to note that the DataDance team has worked very hard to make a new standard of ERC 7962. So, basically we replace a public address with a key hash. And with this key hash, you won't have to leak your all your information. Currently, with with ERC-20 and ERC-71 standard, you have you have to use a public address. And I want to talk about something not on this slide, right? Because I kind of just talked about this to Vitalik and other developers yesterday. So, I understand currently there's a lot of privacy protocols, right? For instance, you know, old and new ones. We have STR-C20 on StarkNet proposed these days.

Zama recently did release the new FFG standard tokens, which is ERC-70 What was that? 72 or 7984, I think. And this is very popular. Off-Stack making a new privacy-first protocol. So, there's a lot of them. I want to make it very clear that they're all very powerful systems, but we are making a right trade-off. Simply because we think we don't want any zero-knowledge proof to be operated or having a computation to be done on the users' iPhones. And we think this is enough to delink or detach the public addresses from the ownership. And this is the standard we believe the most suitable for such a market to be built for tens of thousands of users who want

to trade their data. So, let's put it together, right? So, basically that you come with your history and the stock data, and you authorize that with one tap on the DataDance DataDance wallet. The DataDance wallet verifies it, and they record your consent, and then it start to settle payment. It basically do two things. Firstly, it makes sure it goes to the consumer businesses through the Data Don't Market, where the consumer business buys access to your data. Every time they buy it, we take a fee, and you get paid. A second sale to a second business, you get paid again.

Secondly, it goes to AI through AI Connector, where we make sure that you now you have AI agents and AI assistants who read through and draw on this history that actually makes them know you instead of just guessing what you need. Basically, for the past years, the entire market has been building something for the compute, and we claim that the next market is for the data. Most importantly, we think the largest supply is not to be generated tomorrow. It is already sitting in billions of accounts waiting for permission.

Data Don't unlocks that history and turns it into some assets under the control of the owner. Sold to business, and shared with AI, and paid back to those who created. And now you can see a video of the demo to see how our alteration happens. We also look forward to seeing you at our booth at PB 517. Thank you very much.