What is Portex?
Last updated
Last updated
Our goal is to make data an explicit asset by providing an avenue for buyers and sellers of data to engage in transparent price discovery.
There exists a paradox in the current age of AI. While data is intuitively the world's most valuable commodity, it remains the only commodity for which there is no public venue for exchange. The way we resolve this contradiction will determine the course of AI development and quite literally humanity's future role in it.
We envision two possible paths that could materialize within this decade as AIs become ubiquitous. The pessimistic path is one where the status quo prevails and a handful of companies retain data collection and monetization globally — a future where property rights are undermined and data continues to be extracted by oligopolies. On the flip side, there is also an optimistic path where property rights prevail — where data becomes an explicit asset that individuals and organizations can produce, own, and exchange.
We are optimists who believe crypto provides the required substrate for the optimistic scenario to become reality. Over the past five years, tokenization standards have achieved considerable maturity and can now be easily applied to non-fungible assets like data. Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs) facilitate billions of dollars of volume and provide stable pricing via stablecoins. Tooling for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) has evolved considerably and allow for large consortiums of data owners to be formed. We stand on the shoulders of giants as we apply these composable primitives to allow for the tokenization, exchange and governance of data. We are also pragmatists who understand the challenges of applying this vision to the data space. Like anything digital, data can be replicated, forged, or stolen. Data can lack quality and provenance. As such, we're designing our marketplace to iteratively and pragmatically address these issues. To get the flywheel going, we are starting with a set of inaugural data products with strong evidence of demand.
To learn more about our technical approach, please take a look at the page below:
To end this intro with a fun fact: the name Portex is a reflection of our shared interests in history and the origins of modern cryptography. The Portex was a British electromechanical cipher machine used by secret services in the UK during the late 1940s and 1950s. It was similar to, but more advanced than, the infamous German Enigma, and pays homage to the early days of cryptography as an emerging field. Note: these docs are a work in progress and are in active development