The American dream is “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” however, in observe, it has all the time been about possession. Sadly, the dream of possession is slowly slipping away for many individuals. Harvard College’s 2025 Youth Ballot discovered that three-quarters say they need to personal a house, however barely half assume they ever will. Possession feels more and more out of attain. That lack of possession applies not solely to our bodily property, however to our information as properly.
Non-public information is a strong asset, even when most People don’t understand it. After the 2008 monetary disaster, the federal government mandated that banks enable clients to entry their information, however even at present, nearly twenty years later, J.P. Morgan nonetheless fights to adjust to “open banking.” When firms hoard non-public information to create “moats” for person retention, they stifle competitors and scale back innovation. Worth mustn’t simply circulate to a handful of firms but in addition to the individuals who really create it.
The rise of the agentic internet – the place autonomous AI brokers act on behalf of people – is about to widen the information possession hole. Immediately, AI brokers crawl the web, vacuum up content material with out attribution, and return nothing to customers. As we eat apps like ChatGPT and create prompts with deeply private data, we’ve develop into much more prolific creators of priceless non-public information. That information is the inspiration upon which at present’s digital and AI economic system is constructed.
To cease this cycle of massive firms gobbling up our information without cost would require a technological resolution and, thankfully, one is readily available. Blockchain can flip customers into financial stakeholders within the very digital companies they energy, and usher in a brand new period of wealth, participation, and dynamism.
Till just lately, blockchains sought to retailer all of your information and execute all of your functions —a cumbersome, costly and gradual course of. Now, advances in cryptography and design enable builders to supply the privateness and possession advantages of blockchain however in lighter, easy-to-use packages. These advances will be mixed with a function of blockchain that’s sorely lacking on the normal web: verifiability, or the flexibility to show who you’re and what you probably did.
A verifiable web rests on two pillars: verifiable information and verifiable compute. Verifiable information lets you show details about your self – like your reimbursement historical past, your well being deductible, and even your digital fame—with out handing over every little thing (and, crucially, you don’t want resource-intensive APIs or an organization like J.P. Morgan’s permission to entry this data). Firms like Opacity Community are digital notaries already powering dozens of functions like Earnifi, which reached #1 for finance in Apple’s App Retailer.
Verifiable compute is a cryptographic assure that proves software program executed precisely because it was alleged to, even when it doesn’t run on a blockchain. Firms like EigenLayer, for instance, help you economically punish software program builders of unknown origin in the event that they don’t full the assigned job accurately. Think about sharing non-public well being information with a extremely specialised healthcare AI agent that wasn’t constructed by Sam Altman or Elon Musk – now you may.
Collectively, these applied sciences give the web a belief layer that shifts energy from giant centralized organizations again to people and makes true possession within the digital economic system attainable for the primary time.
Convergence is what occurs when an answer meets an issue in a method that unlocks worth, adoption, or alignment throughout methods. That is starting to happen with blockchain-driven verifiability and information possession points that come up with the agentic internet.
Issues are shifting rapidly. Previously few months, Congress handed the GENIUS Act as a regulatory framework for non-bank actors to create stablecoins, and funds big Stripe acquired Aware of embed 80 million digital wallets straight into person settings. In the meantime, safety agency Cloudflare blocked AI brokers from crawling on-line publishers without cost and, final month, Google partnered with 60 firms, together with PayPal and Deloitte, on a protocol that may let AI brokers pay for issues utilizing stablecoins.
The preliminary benefactor of those initiatives will likely be skilled on-line publishers, however quickly it is going to be all of us—the very individuals creating the information. Initiatives like OpenLedger are already exhibiting how customers can receives a commission for sharing their information. The CLARITY Act, which is working its method by way of the Senate, may make it simpler for brokers to share possession through tokens.
The stakes for achievement are excessive. With out digital possession, individuals stay tenants of the digital economic system. With possession, they develop into stakeholders with a vested curiosity in seeing it flourish. A verifiable web lowers boundaries for startups, embeds belief into methods from the beginning, and offers individuals new methods to take part in worth creation. It restores competitors, innovation, and equity — the actual pillars of the American Dream.
Possession outlined the final American century. Blockchain can guarantee possession shapes the subsequent one century by giving individuals true management over their information – and, in flip, affirming that promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for the digital world.
Adam Winnick is the founding father of Finality Capital Companions, a enterprise fund targeted on digital property. In 2018, Adam based the Medici Community to assist broad institutional adoption of digital property.
