Vana, a San Francisco-based startup giving users control over their personal data, has launched a decentralized data autonomous organization (DAO) for the social media platform Reddit.
Called Reddit Data DAO, or r/datadao, the platform rewards users for contributing their Reddit data and allows them to vote on what to do with the collective data, such as renting it to AI companies for model training. This is also the first data DAO launched on Vana, the company’s CEO Anna Kazlauskas told The Block.
The DAO offers an alternative to Reddit by negotiating a deal with AI companies to sell user data, which could make Reddit profitable 60 million dollars annually. In the coming years, Reddit could generate more than $200 million in revenue by selling user data to third parties to train AI models, Wired reports.
“Why is this $200 million going directly to Reddit rather than to the users who actually created the data?” writing Reddit Data DAO on its website. “r/datadao can vote to use the data to start our own version of Reddit, sell our data directly to AI companies, or use our collective power to get Reddit to pay us directly.”
Users integrate their Reddit account and personal data into the DAO. The DAO then rewards the user for uploading their personal data and Reddit Karma, or a community points system reflecting a person’s reputation on Reddit. Users can claim their points in a crypto wallet. “The more you contribute, the greater your share of karma points,” the DAO added.
Funding News
Vana also announced Wednesday that it had raised $18 million in a 2022 funding round, which had not previously been made public, according to a company spokesperson.
Paradigm led this round, which had additional support from Casey Caruso, Packy McCormick and Polychain Capital. Kazlauskas confirmed that Vana’s total funding to date is $20 million.
“Large internet platforms often hoard information and user-generated content and build the next big wave of technology with that data, without users’ permission,” Kazlauskas said. “At Vana, we believe users should have control of their data and ownership of the models they help create.”
“Today’s launch of Reddit Data DAO is part of this effort, as it establishes a community-owned data treasury that allows users to sell their data to AI companies, leverage the treasury to trade compensation from Reddit or to distribute content on a new, user-owned platform,” Kazlauskas added.
Vana Data DAO
The Reddit Data DAO is the first data DAO Vana offers users to take control of their data from big tech companies.
“A data DAO is a decentralized entity that allows users to aggregate and manage their data, rewarding contributors with a dataset-specific token that represents ownership of the particular dataset,” Kazlauskas wrote in a Tuesday press release. job. “It’s a bit like a union for data.”
Vana’s name derives from the Buddhist term “Nirvana” to refer to the release of data. The company was founded in 2021 and has since amassed 1.1 million users and trained more than 700,000 AI models, according to Vana’s website.
(Fixes Vana user count.)
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