Introduction

In the coming years, data will become one of the most valuable assets in our economy. At Zap, we believe that data will be treated like property, something that can generate income through data ETFs, data bonds, and other financial structures, rather than just digital information stored somewhere.

As data becomes increasingly valuable, it’s crucial that we build a decentralized and permissionless infrastructure for data as an asset market. At Zap, we are excited to introduce Decentralized Data Pools, which allow users to leverage their data as an asset and unlock its full potential.

What Are Decentralized Data Pools?

Decentralized Data Pools (DDPs) enable individuals to securely contribute their data to shared pools, generating collective value while preserving data privacy and ownership. To achieve this, we leverage zkTLS for verifying data authenticity and Nillion’s blind computation to allow businesses to get insights from the pool without accessing to the raw data.

Provable Data with zkTLS

The idea of pooling data to create value isn’t new. The idea of DataDAOs was proposed by Multicoin and Filecoin back in 2022, to allow communities to share and utilize data collectively.

However, a major challenge has always been proving that a data point from a user like “0xAnon” is authentic and not artificially generated. Traditional Data DAOs relied on manual verification or voting mechanisms, which limited scalability and compromised privacy. More advanced approaches used AI authentication, which still lacked in terms of security.

zkTLS addresses this challenge by generating verifiable proofs directly from the data source, ensuring authenticity without compromising privacy or requiring cumbersome verification processes. In addition to zkTLS, we also support other sources of provable data, such as zkEmail and zkPassport, and we believe that in the future, we will have even more ways of generating and collecting provable data.

Why Blind Computation?

Traditional data marketplaces monetize data by selling it directly, but this approach comes with significant issues.

When you sell your data, you sacrifice privacy and significantly reduce the value of the data pool. Most businesses are interested in the insights data can provide, not the raw data itself. Buying entire datasets is often too costly, especially for smaller companies, and there’s always the risk that the data may be fake or provide no valuable insights.

At Zap, we’re partnering with Nillion to leverage their decentralized storage and powerful blind computation technology, enabling companies to gain valuable insights from DDPs without ever accessing the raw data. This way, users maintain privacy and control, while businesses get the insights they need.

Now that we’ve discussed the core technologies behind DDPs, let’s look at how they operate.

How Decentralized Data Pools Work?

1. Data Contribution: Users contribute their data to a specific pool, each representing a collection of similar or complementary data types.

2. Verifiable Data Generation: Using zkTLS and other protocols, data proofs are generated to verify the authenticity of the contributed data.

3. Tokenization: Contributors receive tokens representing their share of the data pool, which are used to track contributions and provide rewards.

4. Data Utilization through Blind Computation: Companies, DAOs, and other parties can pay to execute blind computations on top of DDPs. When data is used, token holders receive yields based on their contributions.

5. Governance: Token holders have voting rights over decisions related to the pool, such as pricing, approved computations, and usage policies.

Unique Use Cases for Decentralized Data Pools

DDPs have enormous potential, but their success depends on finding pools that generate real value for businesses and bring real yield to users. So, we would like to share a few ideas:

Genome Data: Pooling genomic data to support personalized medicine, providing value for pharmaceutical companies, biotech firms, and research institutions.

Tourism Geolocation Data: Pooling geolocation data of tourists to help hospitality businesses, advertisers, and tourism boards optimize marketing, services, and infrastructure.

User Social Content Footprint Pool: Aggregating users’ content consumption history across platforms like Spotify, YouTube, and Netflix, helping content creators, marketers, and streaming services tailor recommendations.

User Identity and Events Data Pool: Combining user demographics, social proofs, and event participation data to enable web3 projects and analytics firms to improve user engagement and services.

Consumer Spending Data Pool: Gathering consumer spending patterns to provide insights for businesses, financial institutions, and manufacturers in developing strategies and products.

NGO Data Pool: Pooling data from NGOs working on climate or social issues to help governments, international organizations, and researchers collaborate toward shared goals.

Of course until we deploy them, we won't actually know its value, but since DDPs are a permissionless protocol, anyone will be able to create any pool for any data schema. Also, in our design, pool creators will be able to receive royalties, so that they can also benefit from creating pools that generate real value.

Decentralized Open Data

DDPs aren’t just about optimizing the current data market, they’re also about unlocking new opportunities that have yet to be realized. Back in 2013, McKinsey estimated that open data could generate $3 to $5 trillion in economic value annually across sectors like healthcare, education, and consumer products.

For example, open data could allow individuals to contribute their health data to help researchers develop personalized treatments or share travel patterns to improve transportation services in their cities. While traditional open data efforts faced challenges in privacy, trust, and collaboration, Decentralized Data Pools could potentially solve these challenges.

Summary

Data is becoming one of the most valuable assets in our economy, and Decentralized Data Pools represent a step toward ensuring individuals can generate value from their own data. By leveraging zkTLS for verifiable data generation and Nillion for blind computation, DDPs make it possible to turn personal data into a secure and valuable asset. This new approach democratizes data ownership, allowing individuals to profit from their data while keeping it safe and private ultimately shaping a future where data is truly owned and controlled by users and not a few corporations.

If you would like to follow our development, follow us on X: https://x.com/0xZapLab