ErinOCon
commented
6 months ago Hi @t3joey, thank you for your proposal and for your patience with our review. Unfortunately, we will not be moving forward with a grant at this time. Wishing you the best as you continue building!
Note: To contact our team with grant program related inquiries, please send an email to grants@fil.org.
Open Grant Proposal:
Terminal 3Project Name: Terminal 3: Data Freedom with IPFS
Proposal Category:
ApplicationsIndividual or Entity Name: Terminal 3 HK Limited
Proposer:
t3joey(Optional) Filecoin ecosystem affiliations: Terminal 3 and its three co-founders have collaborated with and supported Filecoin Foundation in a few capacities: their previous company, Artifact Labs, was a recipient of FF’s grant funding for $250k; they helped coordinate panelist sessions and also spoke at FIL Hong Kong; and the current tech stack leverages IPFS for decentralized storage. We have been working most closely with Clara Tsao.
Do you agree to open source all work you do on behalf of this RFP under the MIT/Apache-2 dual-license?: At this current early stage, some components of our tech stack are open-source while some are proprietary. Our medium-term goal is to evolve the Terminal 3 platform into an open-source developer platform. Currently, the open-source element is a standardized, universal data schema for user profile information (primarily personally identifiable information).
Project Summary
There are 3 realities that are colliding. 1) The next generation of users believe their personal data should be theirs, with 80% believing that they should own and be paid for their digital data, 70% expecting greater privacy, and 65% preferring pseudonymous digital identities. 2) Data privacy laws around the world are becoming increasingly stringent, with organizations now contending with GDPR’s new digital markets and services acts, PIPL in China, and a long-list of new laws under consideration globally. 3) Enterprises are facing extraordinary new costs and requirements around data security and compliance, and are looking for alternative solutions for user data access and use. At the intersection of these 3 realities is a massive problem that will require a world-changing solution.
Terminal 3 is building that solution: a decentralized user data platform that enables enterprise applications to securely store and access customer information. Terminal 3’s core platform performs 3 functions: (1) it enriches, standardizes, and encrypts user data, (2) it atomizes and stores data across a decentralized storage network (IPFS), ensuring self-sovereignty, and (3) it processes data with advanced structured encryption, and provides enterprise use-access via zero-knowledge. Regardless of the application, user data is never stored centrally, never revealed to a third-party, and never copied. We are contributing to Filecoin’s mission to store humanity’s valuable information - in this case, user data - in a decentralized, efficient, and robust manner.
Impact
Terminal 3’s platform is built on top of IPFS, meaning all user data that is ingested into the Terminal 3 platform is stored decentrally and remains self-sovereign. Our platform is already live with our first enterprise partner, Open Campus, a community-led protocol for educators, content creators, parents, and students. Powered by Terminal 3, Open Campus ID is a decentralized identifier (DID) that enables individuals to own their educational credentials and data, and be verified without exposing personally identifiable information. In just a week after its launch on January 23, 2024, 57,649 Open Campus ID profiles have been onboarded through Terminal 3 onto IPFS.
The possible applications are near infinite. Data can come from DIDs, verifiable credentials, gaming profiles, KYC, and others, while zero-knowledge access can power privacy-preserving email, messaging, analytics, customization, advertising, etc. The long-term impact of this will be replacing today’s inequitable $1 trillion data brokerage and advertising industry with a self-sovereign data economy.
Outcomes
Terminal 3’s mission is to make fully private data freely composable, and enable a self-sovereign data economy to become a global top 10 industry. For the purposes of this grant application, our goal is to achieve the following by the end of calendar year 2024:
Adoption, Reach, and Growth Strategies
The target audience are enterprise companies who already have a quantum of users, such as our first enterprise partner, Open Campus, which already has an existing global community of learners and educators. We will not be adopting a direct user acquisition model, which is more costly and less effective. The additional enterprise companies we engage with will be both Web3 native companies as well as traditional Web2 companies. Web3 companies and their users believe in data sovereignty, but the majority of Web3 companies are unable to collect and store user data. Terminal 3’s platform will provide multiple use cases to solve for this. Traditional Web2 enterprises are also now approaching Terminal 3 because they are looking for alternative data solutions because of skyrocketing compliance costs and increasingly stringent regulatory requirements. Our solution benefits the enterprise as well as the user, because user data always remains verifiably private and in their control.
Development Roadmap
Milestone 1 - By March 31, 2024 (end of Q1)
Milestone 2 - By June 30, 2024 (end of Q2)
Milestone 3 - By Sep 30, 2024 (end of Q3)
Milestone 4 - By Dec 31, 2024 (end of Q4)
Total Budget Requested
US$240,000
Maintenance and Upgrade Plans
Our ‘data freedom’ philosophy will be deployed over three years of technology development. 2023 was about Platform: building the foundation of Terminal 3’s core platform to ingest self-sovereign data. 2024 is about Products: building privacy-preserving products that change how enterprises and users treat the sovereignty of data. 2025 will be about Tools: creating the developer tools that allow others to build on Terminal 3’s data freedom platform.
Team
Team Members
Gary Liu, CEO Malcolm Ong, CPO Joey Liu, COO
Team Member LinkedIn Profiles
https://www.linkedin.com/in/t3gary/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/malcolmong/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/t3joey/
Team Website
https://www.terminal3.io/
Relevant Experience
We are Terminal 3: repeat founders and recovering corporate executives, who have spent our careers building on, monetizing, and at times exploiting unsecured user data. Which is why we know that a reckoning is coming to the $1 trillion advertising and data brokerage market, and why we are committing the rest of our careers to building this solution to make fully private user data freely composable.
Gary Liu (CEO) was formerly CEO of the South China Morning Post, the founder & CEO of Artifact Labs, CEO of Digg, and worked at Spotify, AOL, and Google.
Malcolm Ong (CPO) was formerly Head of Product at the South China Morning Post, co-founder & CTO of Skillshare, advisor to Animoca Brands, and worked at Lyft.
Joey Liu (COO) was formerly Head of Strategy at the South China Morning Post, co-founder & GM at Artifact Labs, and worked at Uber.
Team code repositories
Additional Information
We learned about the Open Grants Program from Clara Tsao. joey@terminal3.io