A ‘Wikipedia for Web3’ has raised $40 million in a Series B funding round led by a16z (Andreessen Horowitz).
The Golden protocol financially rewards participants for building a decentralised ‘graph of canonical knowledge’, according to the company.
Ali Yahya, a general partner at a16z and crypto investor, will join the board of the startup alongside current board member Marc Andreessen.
Participants in the round include Matt Bellamy (lead singer of Muse and partner of Helium-3 Ventures), Protocol Labs, Raj Gokal (founder of Solana), Dan Romero, OpenSea Ventures, Juan Benet (founder of Protocol Labs), Arash Ferdowsi (co-founder and ex-CTO of Dropbox), Dylan Field (CEO of Figma), Bastian Lehmann (founder of Postmates), Maryanna Saenko (Future Ventures), Michael Seibel (ex-CEO of Y Combinator and co-founder of Twitch), Avlok Kohli (CEO of AngelList), Harpoon Ventures, Amir Moazami, DCVC, Sridhar Ramaswamy (CEO of Neeva), MVP Ventures, Khaled Naim (CEO of Onfleet), HNVR, Vela Partners, Socii Capital, George Lambeth, FalconX, Stefano Bernardi, Wei Guo, Xoogler, TRAC, Scale Asia Ventures, Chaac Ventures and Neal Dempsey.
Jude Gomila, CEO and founder, wrote in a blog post that as knowledge is fragmented, to find reliable information “one needs to search across centralised repositories, personal webpages, news sites, blogs and private databases… the world lacks a standardised interface for discovering, contributing and verifying knowledge”.
“Creating this interface in a scalable way requires not just data; it requires the development of incentives for data entry, verification, and governance,” he continued. “Web3 technologies and mechanics are well suited to solve the core problems of incentivizing efficient task execution and organising resources for protocol operations.”
The said Golden is in a ‘testnet’ phase with 35,000 individuals participating in its Discord community, a live decentralised dApp, APIs and early governance. “They are currently submitting facts, validating information, improving and building the protocol itself,” he said.
The company utilises a mechanism of ‘slashing’ – the removal of staked crypto collateral – in order to provide a downside for providing or validating incorrect data.
It is constructing canonical public data NFTs for each ‘real world’ entity – or subject – in the protocol. This disincentives the production of duplicates, while providing revenue-sharing rights for the data constructors.
The protocol will also develop reputation scores of good submitters and validators over time, ‘reducing the effort required to validate information’.
“This is not simply a ‘Web3 Wikipedia’. We have a chance to make something much greater in terms of enhanced schema around the data, richer predicates, scale in entity count, validated data, transparent and market based governance, a system that can evolve over time, immutability of ledgering our collective knowledge and permissionless knowledge,” said Gomila.
“Having accurate data in a deeply-linked knowledge graph allows for the creation of new applications and insights that are not currently possible. We are eager to see how this resource will be applied, from classic industries to AI research.”
The protocol aims to launch fully in Q2 2023.
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Kim Kardashian has been fined $1.26 million by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission for promoting EthereumMax. She was paid $250,000 to post about the cryptocurrency on social media but did not disclose this.
French startup METAV.RS has raised €3m seed funding to build ‘Shopify’ for the metaverse. The round was led by Jsquare, Sia Partners and 50 Partners, and included Ledger co-founder David Balland, The Sandbox co-founder and CEO Sébastien Borget, serial entrepreneur Michael Amar, Thibault Renouf, CEO of Partoo, Joel Hazan, MD of BCG, Sébastien Lalevée, CEO of Financière Arbevel and Jonathan Bordereau, CEO of Golden Bees.
Exponential, a decentralised finance investment discovery and risk assessment platform, has raised $14m in seed funding led by Paradigm. Haun Ventures, the VC arm of FTX, Solana, Polygon and USDC stablecoin issuer Circle participated.
Indian crypto exchange WazirX has laid off around 40% of its employees, according to reports, citing a fall in trading volumes due to the bear market and the regulatory climate in India.
Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said the country is already issuing NFTs to local authorities amid a series of planned Web3 and metaverse initiatives. He hinted at digitising national identity cards.
YPF, Argentina’s state-owned energy company, is supplying renewable power to an undisclosed international crypto mining company. The pilot operation provides power generated from waste gas left over from oil production.
Crypto prices
The overall market cap of the more than 21,100 coins is at $946 billion at the time of writing (7am UK), a 2% increase in the last 24 hours.
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