Vana Launches DAO Allowing Users To Control and Sell Their Reddit Data – The Defiant

A new DAO wants to help Reddit users monetize their data for use in training AI models.

On April 3, Vana, a decentralized network hosting “user-owned datasets and models,” announced the launch of Reddit Data DAO on top of its network. The DAO plans to incentivize Reddit users to contribute their comment history to a pooled dataset, which can then be sold to AI companies following a community vote.

“This is not done in coordination with Reddit, and is a big deal for the community given Reddit’s own attempts to sell user data,” Vana said. “The broad idea is to free user data from the major platforms that seek to hoard/monetize it.”

Vana said it already hosts one million users who are actively creating personal data models via the platform, while their open API is attracting a budding ecosystem of developers building AI applications.

Vana also announced that it raised $18 million in a funding round during 2022 that wasn’t previously disclosed.

AI and crypto convergence

Vana is among a budding cohort of projects seeking to innovate at the intersection of artificial intelligence and web3.

AI tokens have recently outperformed the broader crypto markets, with CoinGecko data indicating that the sector’s combined capitalization has grown nearly 700% since late October.

However, few projects have managed to develop unique use cases for AI, with many teams offering up lofty promises of liberating artificial intelligence development from the handful of centralized entities currently dominating the AI sector through decentralization.

Vana hopes to deliver on this objective by leveraging on-chain permissions to make users’ data private, secure, and portable.

Data is tokenized and stored on either a personal device or trusted node, and can be used to train AI models or applications. Vana also provides decentralized computing power to facilitate distributed training.

“The architecture combines a secure off-chain server with smart contracts to enable user-owned data and models,” states Vana’s documentation.

Users contributing to data towards a particular dataset on the platform are rewarded with ERC-20 “dataset-specific tokens” facilitating voting on how the dataset is used. Vana also offers “model-specific tokens” as incentives to users who contribute GPU computation or data contributing to AI models generated by the platform.