Masa is launching its ZK-data network and marketplace in hopes of “building an open, secure, and incentivized economy for the world’s personal data.”
The launch is slated for Q1 2024. Masa aims to finally empower people to “take back control of their data and be fairly compensated for its use.”
It’s worth noting that this concept is nothing new in the Web3 space, and many projects have tried to deliver on these promises. However, blockchain/DLT is just a data structure and any significant development in this area would require careful planning and implementation. So far, crypto and Web3 is still a speculative space that has not protected user data or privacy. In fact, the ecosystem has become well-known for its large number of security breaches and hacks, among other abusive activities. In short, Web3 and these types of projects have offered nothing except major problems for consumers and other entities.
As explained in a blog post, personal data is created at “a rapidly growing rate, and with technology further permeating everyone’s daily lives, it will only grow more aggressively. It is estimated that 288 million terabytes of new data is created each day.”
Handling this demand requires high-performance blockchain infrastructure to ensure the best experience for Masa users, “both data owners and companies interested in using that data.”
The Masa team worked with AvaCloud to “deploy a gasless, self-sovereign Avalanche Subnet, a dedicated, customizable blockchain network, which empowers developers to access and verify high volumes of zero-knowledge encrypted data at a massive scale, at a low cost.”
To accelerate adoption of Masa across the Avalanche platform and all of its Subnets, Masa is receiving support “from the Avalanche Foundation and a strategic investment from Avalanche’s Blizzard Fund.”
Today’s personal data — from internet browsing history to X (f/k/a Twitter) direct messages — is locked up “in proprietary silos controlled by big tech companies. These companies are reselling personal data without consent and without compensating the owners of that data.”
This is worsened by “the proliferation of AI.”
There is an astronomical demand in “using peoples’ personal data to train AI models and AI agents.”
In the AI era, data is “the new oil.” Unfortunately, people are “not actively consenting for their data to be used, and they receive no benefits or financial incentive for their data contribution.”
Masa envisions a world “where your data pays you.”
To achieve this vision, Masa invented “a technology, the Zero-Knowledge Soulbound Token (zkSBT). zkSBTs serve as a personal data locker. A person’s digital footprint and social graph, such as a person’s participation in Web3 communities or usage of a decentralized application, is encrypted and stored in a completely private way in a personal zkSBT data locker.”
In a little over a year, “over 890,000 unique user wallets have permissioned over 8 -million data events to the Masa Network. Upon the Masa Network launch, users will be able to view their personal digital footprint in their zkSBT data locker, and share (via staking) their data in the Masa Data Marketplace for financial incentives.”
For example, a user can “grant a financial institution access to their Masa zkSBT for age verification.”
The financial institution can “verify that a user is over the age of 21 without seeing their date of birth.”
The data is then transmitted “using an encrypted message stream that utilizes the blockchain infrastructure to ensure that no third party gains access to the data and that the data remains secure and private.”
Anyone building applications “needing data, from privacy-preserved advertising to training AI models, will be able to tap into this massive collection of private-by-default user data.”
As noted in the update, Masa is building the largest zero-knowledge user data network in the world. Masa is architecting the “decentralized Google” for the AI era: A scalable, secure, and resilient global data marketplace, “where billions of users get compensated by their data contribution, and millions of developers build innovative applications using private-by-default user data.”
At present, none of these projects have actually materialized and offered end-users anything meaningful. They’ve done a lot more harm than good. Hopefully, in 2024, users will be able to take advantage of new user-cases from the crypto and DeFi sector.