DIRT Protocol raises $3M from General Catalyst, Greylock, Lightspeed, and Pantera to build a Wikipedia for structured data
We are excited to announce that DIRT Protocol has raised a $3M seed round with participation from General Catalyst, Greylock Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group, SV Angel, HustleFund, Village Global, DDC, #Angels, Elad Gil, Fred Ehrsam, Linda Xie, and others.
What is DIRT Protocol?
DIRT is a protocol for decentralized information curation. Our mission is to organize the world’s information and to make it freely accessible.
Data in the 21st century is like oil in the 20th century — an immensely valuable asset that is critical to the economy. Unfortunately most data is privately held and expensive to access. These data silos limit competition and stifle creativity. We believe that structured data about the world needs to be freely available for new applications and services to emerge.
Why do we need DIRT?
In many domains, information sources are biased or dishonest. For example, companies pay for positive product reviews. In unregulated markets, financial data may be purposely misrepresented. While crowd-based curation removes the dependency on a single source, this approach struggles to maintain quality because there are no incentives for moderation.
DIRT is a new approach to crowdsourcing
With DIRT, we propose a new way to crowdsource trusted information at scale. DIRT is a protocol to curate information using token staking to incentivize honesty.
Similar to Wikipedia, DIRT allows anyone to contribute information. DIRT maintains accuracy because every contributor needs to deposit tokens to write data. If the data is correct, it is freely shared. If the data is incorrect, anyone can challenge the data and earn tokens for identifying these inaccurate facts. Our protocol and platform makes it economically irrational for misinformation to persist in a data set.
DIRT is not a Token Curated Registry (TCR). DIRT is a protocol to build TCRs.
What’s next
We are working with partners to build the first applications for DIRT. If you are interested in being on our early partners and using DIRT, please reach out at hello@dirtprotocol.com. We will release our whitepaper in the coming weeks. Join our mailing list to stay updated.
Join us
We are a team of engineers and serial entrepreneurs. We design and build our protocol with clear use cases in mind. If you want to join us on our mission to make data freely available, please apply to work with the DIRT team.
