[ARCHIVED] Soli.xyz –– Fair Data Economy Grant

Title: Soli.xyz –– Fair Data Economy

Authors: Soli Leadership Team

Date: June 23 2022

Dear BitDAO community,

Thank you for your time and consideration of our soft proposal. Our organization, Soli, is reaching out to request a grant to fund the development of our technical roadmap. Recognizing BitDAO’s mission to accelerate next-gen organizations, we believe that our mission is aligned with public good such that a grant from BitDAO would enable us to work together advancing positive social change. Throughout this proposal, we will highlight our organization’s mission, progress, plans, and funding request.

The Mission of Soli

We believe that individuals who have access to smartphones and laptops constantly create a tremendous amount of valuable information passively. We are also aware that the consumer data economy is a massive digital ecosystem where billions of dollars are exchanged every year, and largely without the knowledge of the people whose information is being transacted. Thus, we envision a fairer future where individuals have insight into what businesses are accessing their data and, moreover, individuals get paid for their valuable personal data.

Our Progress So Far

We began with a mobile application that allowed consumers to contribute their data to our organization and rapidly scaled to over 100,000 people sharing location, search, demographic, and other types of frequently transacted types of consumer information. This initial application, Solipay, is still live, with more details available at https://solipay.tech. It was only recently, however, that we were able to secure a contract with an existing data broker that would like to purchase our data on behalf of some of the largest companies in the US, including brands such as Adidas, Gap, Levis, and thousands more. The particular type of information these organizations are looking to buy are real-time purchase datasets, i.e. bank transaction histories. With the infrastructure from our initial app, we were able to develop new software to collect this exact type of information. The new app is live today, with more details available at https://soli.xyz.

Future Plans

As our company continues to grow, we would like to become the world’s first web3 data wallet, where one’s crypto wallet and data footprint merge into a cohesive measure of identity that actually earns you the passive income you deserve from your data. This will require significantly more human capital across engineering, product, marketing, operations, sales, and more, which is why we are reaching out to leading web3 organizations, such as BitDAO, for additional support on our mission. Given that our efforts are intended to unilaterally empower individuals, we believe that there is significant potential for BitDAO to support and benefit from our endeavors.

Funding Request

We are requesting 1M BIT in exchange for a SAFE stake in our company with a token warrant should we launch a token to advance our company as well. These funds will go directly to expanding our existing team. Today, we have engineers with experience at major universities such as Columbia and Yale as well as established industry organizations such as NASA and IBM developing, with many more waiting to join upon receiving additional funding.

In all, we welcome conversation from the existing community, hoping that our altruistic mission is recognized as one worth funding. Thank you again for your time and consideration.

How will your proposal, if activated, benefit BitDAO?

We are offering BitDAO an equity and token stake in our company in exchange for BIT tokens. This investment can directly contribute to the treasury of the DAO.

What are the projected outcomes?

We envision the outcomes to be on-par with early-stage investing in blockchain enabled businesses like our own.

How long will it take to complete your proposed changes?

We will be working over the coming months and years to continue scaling our organization’s mission & contributing back to the DAO as such.

Who is involved?

Our Team has industry experience spanning NASA, IBM, Apple, Deutsche Bank, and an acquired cryptocurrency hedge fund as well as academic institutions including Stanford, Yale, Columbia, and more. Here is an extended list of our team members:

Leadership Team

  • CEO - Alex Nicita
  • CTO - Danny Dager
  • COO - Kwabena Ayim-Aboagye

Software Engineers:

  • Kiera Cawley
  • Liza Trundle
  • Jack O’Connor
  • Ori Spector

Operations Specialist:

  • Cassidy Williams

What are the milestones?

The milestones include scaling our new application Soli.xyz to 100,000+ active users by the end of this year, largely driven by support from leading crypto organizations like BitDAO.

Specifications:

  1. Timeline: 6 months for scaling the existing product, 1-2 years for additional product development and liquidity return on token investment.
  1. Budget: 1M BIT
  1. Add technical details and/or links to source documentation: See links above.
  1. Include any other relevant details on how this proposal will be accomplished: We will be working in close communication with members of BitDAO to receive product feedback and guidance as our organization scales.

Next Steps? If this proposal is accepted, what are the immediate action items?

We will immediately begin expanding our company’s operations in engineering, product, marketing, and sales. Specifically, we will be deploying capital into hiring from an existing talent pool of strong web3 developers waiting to join our organization upon receiving additional funding.

14 Likes

Thanks for sharing your proposal with the BIT Community! If you’d like to join us on one of our upcoming Twitter Spaces for a Q&A, let us know here or in the #governance channel of the BitDAO Discord.

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Sounds super cool! I love the idea of a web3 investment wallet. Seems like a phone app able to handle these things would be very useful!

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It is good to transfer business value of personal information to money for individual, it is stolen by huge platform in web2 for a long time. But I have some questions:
Will this lead to the misuse of information?
Can we decide which part of information can be collected?

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Glad you agree with our mission & great questions–happy to clarify.

  • We strive to partner only with the most reputable organizations when providing access to data. In fact, inside our mobile app, we list all of the brands that people can interact with using their fair data profiles, thus providing a transparent layer between the personal data and the business accessing the data. We welcome you to download the most recent version of our application and try it out to see how clear it is with data being shared with brands!
  • Yes, 100%. The type of information collected is fully opt-in with significantly clearer permissions than existing applications.
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@Soli_Nicita can you share your thoughts on requesting funding in $BIT rather than in stablecoins?

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Appreciate @Soli_Nicita for the proposal.

Please find my feedback as below:

  1. How do you say that it’s for public good? Why do you think individuals like to sell their personal data?
  2. What’s the reason behind asking for funding $ BIT 1M, instead of asking for stable coins or USD equivalent ?
  3. Coming to your proposed ops: How relevant is the data when it’s not real, as you are saying that transactions will be with only chosen vendors!
  4. Most importantly, you are asking consumers to trust you ( to share their transactions data), then to trust again ( in your judgement about the vendors, and about their activities etc)…

In other words, you are asking for trust, time and again, that can’t be an ingredient of a trustless system!

Your business model is against BitDAO’s ethos, considering “BitDAO aims to support builders of the decentralised economy.”

Trust this helps.

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@Kravi Appreciate the feedback. Allow us to explain further:

  • Perhaps consider the perspective of @mixednuts With the rise of traditional consumer software platforms, an opaque economy for personal data has emerged. The value of your information is not in your control, but a transparent and decentralized alternative exists–which is precisely what we are building.

  • This is a good point. We are open to stablecoins instead.

  • Yes, we are launching with a set of vendors. There is more information these vendors at our website https://soli.xyz. That being said, this data remains in the users control and will be able to be monetized in more ways in the future. Effectively, the point is that this data has real monetary value immediately on our platform. We are committed to helping users achieve the fair value of their information over time.

  • Our software is simply an interface to let people own and benefit from their data. Considering the status quo of how this information is given away for free, there is a significant improvement in the state of the art of transparency around opting-in to our platform.

Overall, I hope that you consider the ethos of a decentralized economy to be one where you have ownership – even cryptographic ownership – over your information. That is our mission, which is certainly aligned with BitDAO’s ethos.

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@monkey_scratch_head Yes, we are open to stablecoins instead. This would be officially decided prior to the proper forum post for voting.

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Most countries around the world have laws prohibiting the collection of personal privacy data. You want to collect shared location, search content, demographics, etc. And use it for profit, which I don’t think is legal and compliant.
On the issue of illegality, I suggest careful consideration of this proposal!
My point is: No matter what purpose you collect personal data for, it may directly or indirectly violate the privacy rights of others, for example: I can steal other people’s personal information to gain benefits on your platform. And you can’t tell its authenticity. Have you considered this issue?

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Appreciate @Soli_Nicita for your attempt to tap into this pain point, however I have a few questions:

  1. Collecting data in some countries are illegal, have you figured out with the legal team to have this sorted out?
  2. What is the technical solutions to make sure personal data collected from users is safe and anonymous (even Soli should not be able to identify users)?
  3. After selling the data, if I change my mind, can I request to have my data removed completely (even on the corporations’ database)? If yes, what are the measures you plan to take to make sure my data is completely deleted?
  4. There are a few other data economy platforms like $OCEAN, $DATA. They have already established partnerships with top-tiered corporations but it seems like they have problems scaling up. What is your take on this?

Agree with @kravi on taking stablecoins since it’s not exposed to market volatility.

@Norton and @tdindefiland –– Our software is compliant with the foremost international data privacy laws. We welcome both of you to download our app & experience the clarity of the opt-in process for sharing data. In fact, our organization is explicitly committed to bringing transparency to the opaque data brokering industry.

Moreover, security is paramount in our system design. We encrypt information with state of the art ciphers in order to remain compliant, robust, and secure. As far as anonymization is possible, we work to operate atop our data while minimizing decryption. And, yes, you can easily opt to have your data deleted by us and organizations that have access to it through standard GDPR & CCPA opt out processes. Finally, we are in alignment with platforms like $OCEAN and $DATA, however we differ in the sense that we are a consumer-facing solution: individuals are meant to download our platform and interact with data buyers directly, rather than the more generalized marketplace solutions of the aforementioned platforms.

In accordance with the forum archiving policy, this discussion will be moved to the General Archive.