By
Steve Muchoki
May 13th, 2024
Swash’s first-wave solutions are already under construction ahead of October 29’s token sale.
With the spread of the internet, smartphones, and digital media in general, the gathering, analysis and sale of personal data has become an industry unto itself.
Yet it’s an industry that remains extremely lopsided when one considers how little recompense the average internet user receives for all that precious data they knowingly, or unknowingly, supply large tech companies.
The Data Ecosystem of Swash
Enter Swash, and its first-of-a-kind Data Union which takes aim at the data economy on behalf of internet users, including individuals, businesses, and developers. Boasting a working product with over 85,000 users, the initial DEX offering (IDO) for the project’s native token kicks off on October 29, after a staggering 45,000 whitelist applications. Recently, the company announced a successful $7m fundraise and was also selected as one of Coinlist Seed’s Fall 2021 batch.
When the native SWASH token officially goes on sale, it will mark the transformation of Swash from a useful Data Union into a fully-fledged information ecosystem, wherein users from all ends of the data generation and analysis pipeline will be incentivised to refine the “crude oil of the digital economy” into something that benefits everyone.
As it stands, it is the average consumer of digital media who is the product of the online world. This product generates revenue almost 24 hours a day in the form of data – data which is scalped and sold to the highest bidder, often without the knowledge or consent of the individual.
Re-shaping the Digital Data Landscape
Swash revolutionizes the data economy through a combination of novel approaches, not least a blockchain-based protocol and in-house cryptocurrency token. First, users are incentivized to join the Swash community with the promise that they will be compensated for the data they generate. Then, businesses and data scientists are granted consensual access to individuals’ data, allowing them to analyze higher quality, zero-party data directly from users themselves.
The presence of untarnished user data on Swash also provides developers with more precise information upon which to base a new generation of applications, in the blockchain space and beyond. These normally disparate elements are all helped to collaborate and work together via Swash’s interlocking mechanisms of mutually beneficial incentives, creating a natural alignment of goals.
As witnessed with the messy Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, major corporations are quite happy to pay lip service to regulations if it means more readily available access to consumer data. Pundits and analysts predict that the next major tech giant to rise from the primordial soup of the internet will be the one that figures out how to utilize personal data most efficiently.
SWASH Token and First Wave Innovation
The protocol’s native SWASH token will be used in a variety ways, including as a utility and governance token, and will also be integrated into cross-chain systems with some of the most-used blockchains in the industry, not least Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), and xDai.
Swash’s first-wave solutions are already under construction ahead of October 29’s token sale. These include sIntelligence, a customizable web platform which delivers unique insights to businesses from a range of industries, and sApps, dedicated Swash-based applications that benefit from the improved tools, insights and analysis provided by the protocol’s data.
Finally, sCompute allows businesses and data scientists to analyse data on-site without having to purchase, move and store it. By allowing analysts to perform data computations on-site, the same information can be purchased on Swash time and time again, generating more passive revenue for the consumer who produced the data-sets in the first place.