Masa is introducing its ZK-data network and marketplace to build a global market for personal data that is transparent, secure, and profitable. The launch is planned for the first quarter of 2024. Masa wants to allow people to retake data ownership and receive fair recompense for its use. The amount of personal data produced rapidly expands, and as technology continues to pervade everyone’s daily lives, this rise will only accelerate. According to estimations, 288 million gigabytes of new data are generated daily.
High-performance blockchain infrastructure is required to handle this demand and deliver the best possible experience for Masa users, including data owners and businesses interested in monetizing the data. The Masa team collaborated with Ava Cloud to create a gasless, self-governing Avalanche Subnet—a customized reconfigurable blockchain network—that allows developers to access and validate vast volumes of zero-knowledge encrypted data on a large scale and at a lower price.
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The Avalanche Foundation is supporting Masa, and Avalanche’s Blizzard Fund is making a strategic investment in order to hasten the process of adoption of Masa throughout the Avalanche platform and all of its subnetworks.
Masa envisions a future in which consumers are compensated for their data. Masa created a revolutionary technology known as the Zero-Knowledge Soulbound Token (zkSBT) to achieve this goal. zkSBTs serve as private data safes. A person’s digital footprint and social graph are encrypted and safely stored in a personal zkSBT data vault, which includes their use of decentralized applications and participation in Web3 groups.
More than 890,000 distinct user wallets have provided permission for more than 8 million data events to be submitted to the Masa Network in just over a year. With the advent of the Masa Network, users can inspect their digital footprint in their zkSBT data locker and share (by staking) their data in the Masa Data Marketplace to gain rewards.
For example, a user may grant a financial institution access to their Masa zkSBT in order to verify their age. Without seeing a user’s date of birth, the financial institution can confirm that they are over the age of 21. To ensure that no third party has access to the data and remains private and secure, the data is transferred across an encrypted message stream using the blockchain architecture.
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This large library of user data that is private by default will be available to anyone designing apps that require data, from training AI models to privacy-preserving advertising.
