Masa Network Launches Marketplace For Tokenized Data To Train AI Models

Web3 projects continue to embrace artificial intelligence, with Masa Network, a project offering tokenized rewards to users who contribute data used to train AI models, launching on mainnet.

Masa’s AI data network and marketplace completed its mainnet launch on April 11.

Masa provides rewards to users for securely contributing anonymized data to an aggregated dataset. The project also allows developers to create specialized AI agents trained on Masa’s database.

Masa said 1.4 million users have already contributed 40 million anonymized data points to the network. Developers can leverage Masa’s suite of decentralized Large Language Models to build agents and models.

“Every Internet user can be an anonymized data contributor and node worker, earning token rewards by sharing their data and unused compute power with AI developers,” Masa said. “For AI developers, Masa provides proprietary, high-quality, verified personal data in real-time that they can use to train AI models which are ‘specialized’ rather than ‘generalized’, creating hyper-personalized AI agents.”

Masa users can contribute data via multiple campaigns, including “quest-to-earn” on the Masa App, “surf-to-earn” via Masa’s Chrome Browser Extension, or “node-to-earn” through the Masa Oracle. Each campaign distributes data “points” which can be shared on the Masa Data Marketplace in exchange for tokenized rewards.

Data provided by users is kept private and encrypted through the use of non-transferable soulbound tokens secured by zero-knowledge proofs.

The project’s MASA token also went live on exchanges on April 11 following an $8.75 million token sale on Coinlist that distributed 63.6 million tokens for $0.079 and sold out in 17 minutes on March 7.

MASA last changed hands for $0.39 after crashing 51% so far today, according to CoinGecko. A quarter of the tokens sold via Coinlist were unlocked today.

Masa has allocated nearly 6.67 million MASA to reward users who contribute to its AI Data Marketplace.

Crypto and AI converge

The recent artificial intelligence boom has taken the web3 sector by storm, with the combined capitalization of AI tokens surging nearly 700% since late October to $25 billion, according to CoinGecko.

However, despite the bullish market momentum, few projects offer novel use cases leveraging web3 technologies.

Masa is the latest example of a web3 project offering a decentralized platform allowing users to contribute their data to train AI models in exchange for rewards.

Vana, a project similarly offering a decentralized network hosting user-owned datasets and community-built AI models, announced the launch of the Reddit Data DAO on April 3.

The DAO allows Reddit users to compile their Reddit comment history to a pooled data set in exchange for tokens. The tokens allow holders to participate in governance to vote on monetizing the dataset by selling it to AI companies for model training.