Golden is proud to announce a $40M Series B led by a16z Crypto. Ali Yahya joined the board along with current board member Marc Andreessen. This brings the total funding to ~$60M. The funding will allow Golden to build a decentralized, incentive-based system. It will incorporate Web3 mechanics to ingest data into new protocols.
Participants include cryptocurrency luminaries, operators, founders, and long-time supporters. According to Golden’s official website, other participants include;
Protocol Labs, Raj Gokal (founder of Solana), Dan Romero, OpenSea Ventures, Juan Benet (founder of Protocol Labs), Arash Ferdowsi (co-founder and former CTO of Dropbox), Dylan Field (CEO of Figma), Bastian Lehmann (founder of Postmates and new cryptocurrency company), Maryanna Saenko (of Future Ventures), Michael Seibel (former CEO of Y Combinator and co-founder of Twitch), Avlok Kohli (CEO of AngelList), a16z Cultural Leadership Fund, Harpoon Ventures, Amir Moazami, DCVC, Matt Bellamy (lead singer of Muse, partner of Helium-3 Ventures), Sridhar Ramaswamy (CEO of new search engine Neeva), MVP Ventures, Khaled Naim (CEO of Onfleet), HNVR, Vela Partners, Socii Capital, George Lambeth, FalconX, Stefano Bernardi, Wei Guo, Xoogler, TRAC, Scale Asia Ventures, Chaac Ventures, Neal Dempsey, etc.“
Decentralized Protocol for Knowledge
Knowledge is disjointed. Finding reliable information requires searching centralized repositories, personal websites, news sites, blogs, and private databases. The world needs a standardized interface for discovering, contributing, and validating knowledge.
Building this interface at scale requires incentives for data entry, validation, and governance. Web3’s technologies and mechanisms are well suited to solve core problems, provide incentives to perform tasks efficiently, and organize resources for protocol operations.
The initial protocol concept has generated a lot of interest. It is currently in the testnet stage, with 35,000 people joining the Discord community. They run a live decentralized app (dApps), APIs, and early governance. They are now submitting facts, verifying information, and improving and building the protocol.
This protocol is a game theory system that motivates agents to approach the truth. It provides financial rewards for correct data. Organizations that pay with data provide a direct feedback loop to focus on accuracy and dynamic market pricing.
Blockchain creates a ledger of transactions and, ultimately, the data itself. Tokenization can incentivize good actors to insert correct data into the system and validators to verify the accuracy of the data.
A Protocol for Knowledge Compilation, Generation, and Storage
The Golden Protocol rewards participants financially for creating a decentralized, unauthorized view of canonical knowledge. According to Golden,
“We live in an age of extreme niche. This is an age where validation and integrity are more important than prestige. Our Encyclopedia of Goldens has no limits on shelf space.
When Einstein published his groundbreaking work, special relativity did not come to the general public’s attention. This could have been the subject that should have been removed from the world’s norms.
The notorious limitations of current encyclopedias limit the availability of knowledge on fascinating and valuable niche topics. We adopt a maximum understanding perspective. Add to what Wikipedia has built over the past 18 years and use existence as a framework for whether to cover a topic or not to unlock hidden knowledge. Like Mandelbrot’s sets and Fermat’s brilliant works, the richness is in the edges, margins, and footnotes.”
Golden’s mission is to collect, organize, and represent over 10 billion topics in an accessible way. Golden presents them in comprehensive and neutrally written topic pages.
