Decentralized Knowledge Protocol Raises $40 Million In Funding Led By a16z

Decentralized knowledge protocol Golden has officially raised $40 million in a funding round led by venture firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from Protocol Labs, OpenSea Ventures and the founders of Solana, Dropbox, Postmates and Twitch.

This brings the total funds raised by Golden to approximately $60 million, Golden founder and chief executive officer Jude Gomila wrote in an announcement on the firm's website. The amount will fund the creation of a decentralized and incentivized data protocol wherein blockchain-based tokens will be used to incentivize users to submit accurate information.

"Knowledge is fragmented; to find reliable information, one needs to search across centralized repositories, personal webpages, news sites, blogs and private databases. The world lacks a standardized interface for discovering, contributing and verifying knowledge," Gomila noted. "Creating this interface in a scalable way requires not just data; it requires the development of incentives for data entry, verification and governance."

The Golden protocol will award users who provide correct information as well as those who verify such information. On the other hand, it will penalize those who submit wrong information. Any entity, including organizations, can pay to access the data contained in the Golden protocol.

Currently, the protocol is in the testnet phase, and the launch has been planned for the second quarter of 2023. More than 35,000 users have signed up for the testnet phase as well, according to the firm.

"This is not simply a 'web3 Wikipedia,'" Gomila added. "We have a chance to make something much greater in terms of enhanced schema around the data, richer predicates, scale in entity count, validated data, transparent and market based governance, a system that can evolve over time, immutability of ledgering our collective knowledge and permissionless knowledge."

Interestingly, there has been a significant surge in capital investment in the crypto space despite the current crypto market crash. As per previous reports, hedge fund Pantera Capital was in talks to raise around $1.25 billion for a new blockchain fund.