Decentralized Data Sharing Network ‘Project Galaxy’ Raises $10M

Project Galaxy, a way to rethink how digital credentials are handled in the next generation of the internet, has closed a $10 million funding round co-led by Multicoin Capital and Dragonfly Capital.

The way the existing internet has evolved, our data is segregated across many different applications and services, such as behavioral data collected by Google and Facebook, or our credit histories on scoring websites and government agencies. An aggregate data layer connected and incentivized in such a way that applications can query it is lacking, said Project Galaxy co-founder Harry Zhang.

“You don’t own that data, these big companies and services are monetizing it,” said Zhang in an interview. “But since we are in a Web 3 world now, we can use open permissionless blockchain technology and finally have the chance to build the infrastructure for this aggregated layer of credential data that’s accessible to all developers in Web 3.”

Project Galaxy, which is live and in use, manages the largest credential data network in Web 3 – a re-architecturing of the existing Web 2 world, leaning towards decentralized consensus mechanisms, rather than a handful of monolithic platforms.

Structurally, Project Galaxy looks and functions very similar to The Graph. There are credential contributors, curators and consumers.

“The Graph is one of the data sources in our infrastructure,” Zhang said. “You can submit these sub-graph queries so that they can turn them into our credential data, which they will earn on our network.”

Read more: The Graph, the 'Google of Blockchains,' Raises $50M in Round Led by Tiger Global

Participants who contribute data to Project Galaxy or curate data on the system can earn money when that data is queried and used. This could be private data about an individual, or it could be public data curated from the blockchain realm as well as Web 2 applications like Twitter, TikTok or GitHub, Zhang explained.

“We are building this very permissionless and open infrastructure, and we don’t want to restrict any use case,” Zhang said. “For now, the focus is on the side of loyalty programs, growth hacking campaigns, maybe credit scoring in the near future, and we also have a number of projects using us to customize voting systems.”