KurateDAO, a database developed on the blockchain, recently announced the close of its $6.85 million seed funding round, which was reportedly led by Polychain Capital.
KurateDAO’s mission is to “use economic incentives to curate the world’s information.”
Established this year, KurateDAO sees today’s “one size fits all” approach to online content curation as “the bottleneck holding back the internet from growing 100x.”
As the number of Web 3.0 apps continues to increase, they will “need to be more nuanced in determining which content is included and how it is monetized.” KurateDAO is “building the first community curated blockchain-based database to solve this problem.”
KurateDAO aims to “harness the power of web3 and communities to decentralize the content curation process.” A decentralized curation process allows for “more nuance in determining what should be included and why, while enabling decisions to be made quickly and effectively.”
In order to incentivize collaboration, KurateDAO “pays curators and scouts that organize useful information.” As the database layer, KurateDAO sees itself “supporting a new generation of Web3 applications with community curated databases.”
Michael Fischer, CEO of KurateDAO, stated:
“Truth and utility can be determined in many ways. KurateDAO seeks to create economic incentives for people to come together to curate data by driving the process through a transparent and collaborative Web3 court system that has the efficiency of a free-market system to scale the judicial process.”
Traditionally, web apps have a centralized curator who “determines what is allowed in a database.”
When one person or organization is unable to review every piece of content, these apps leverage AI algorithms, and outsourced labor to “determine what should be included and excluded from the database.”
Firms spend billions of dollars “trying to solve the problem of determining the types of content they want on their platform.”
Companies have one Terms of Service that “applies to all content, even though each genre of content should be curated to different standards and by people with domain expertise.”
KurateDAO creates “a real financial market for curating news articles, online forum posts, NFTs, music, restaurant reviews, web3 apps, jobs, academic journal articles, and more.”
As noted in a release, KurateDAO was founded in 2022 by Michael Fischer “to use crypto economic games to curate the world’s information.”
Before that he was a PhD student at Stanford in computer science studying artificial intelligence. He has reportedly “co-authored the book Regulating AI based on his experience as the head TA for a Stanford Law School class taught by a California Supreme Court justice.”
Fischer also “completed his undergraduate degree at Stanford University in computer science.”
It’s worth noting that similar online curation platforms leveraging blockchain and claiming to be decentralized have not been too successful. There’s really nothing preventing the so-called curators from promoting certain content based on their own biases and preferences. They might also be receiving additional financial resources from content creators or providers. It is highly unlikely that a so-called decentralized content curation solution will actually offer meaningful benefits.
To find out more, you may visit kuratedao.xyz.