Navigate is the first Web3-native big data company. You may be thinking “Cool. Big data. That’s very early 2000s of you. Isn’t it 2024? We’re all about AI now.”
Yes. Yes, we are. And the most exciting consumer facing AI technology, large language models (LLMs), are only possible because of big data. Very big data, in fact.
When it comes to accelerating AI, data is — and always will be — the fundamental piece.
The world has been prioritizing AI for a long time now. LLMs are simply the latest stage of that progress and are proving to be the key technology shaping the future of how AI will be applied to the applications people use every daynd with the emergence of LLMs, came quite the arms race for compute capacity. For example, just look at Microsoft, which is building Stargate, a $100 billion dollar data center that has a target launch date in 2028. Or Meta and Google’s increasingly prevalent focus on AI. Or Elon’s strategy with xAI. But at the same time, we must be cognizant of why that compute capacity is being sought after from these tech giants in the first place.
The answer? To process more data and own every piece of the lucrative data pie, of course.
Big tech companies are escalating this arms race by the day, siloing valuable data to ensure they get the biggest cut of the data pie, leaving little profit in return for anyone else. Elon, after his acquisition of Twitter, now X, locked down API access. Reddit upped the prices of their APIs. But these are just two recent examples of platforms building walls to prevent “their” data from being used by other companies. But funny enough, the data they treasure and fight for is not always generated from the company itself, but from users. X, Reddit, Meta, Google, Youtube, are just a few of the platforms that profit from new data being created every second of every day, data created by you and me.
While those companies earn from the data and insights users give them just by utilizing the platform, the end user— or the one who actually created that valuable data — is ignored. We, the users, the contributors, need to be given at least the option of having more control over our data and to be able to reap some of the rewards that our data generates. That is not the case today.
Web3 is positioned to completely turn this model upside down. Today, the best use case for blockchain is a very simple one: decentralized ownership. We’re not going to solve world hunger with it, but we are going to be able to create an alternative for people who want more ownership and control. That’s it. Simple as that—and it’s about time!
That is what Navigate is all about.
Our mission is to create a new kind of big data platform that rewards people for contributing data that matters. Through both active and passive data contributions, Navigate will power a data ecosystem that finally lets users get a piece of the pie and earn from the valuable data they generate every day.
What’s Coming: Getting a Piece of the Pie With Navigate’s Data Quest
Users will be able to contribute to Navigate in two main ways: active data contributions (such as data labeling tasks) and passive data sharing (such as contributing your specific consumer application data, like Amazon order history or Spotify listening history) all through Navigate’s application Data Quest.
Now you might read this, and this go, “What!? Why do you want all my data? That should be private!”. Spoiler alert. It’s not private.
The data you help create is very valuable data. Take Amazon order history for example. Amazon is the only other company in the world that is collecting this data, it sits behind their corporate firewall, and by the way they sell it all the time, without us even knowing.
It isn’t really a question of whether our data is being sold, just if we are getting a piece of the pie or not. Currently, none of us are getting anything.
Maybe this type of data isn’t exciting if you try to sell just yours or I try to sell just mine independently, but if we all get together as a community and sell our collective shopping history, now that becomes very appealing.
With Navigate, the community not only receives rewards when they share or contribute data, but they also earn when the datasets they help augment and build get bought or licensed by real companies. You get paid whenever your data generates value. Crazy, right?
This is a platform that will liberate your data from behind corporate firewalls and give you the piece of the pie you so rightfully earned!
Own your data. Monetize your data. Make your data work for you. That’s the dream.
And now, back to building.
