Dia Data was one of the star performers to come out of our Base Camp Accelerator (2019, Fall Cohort), an accelerator format we launched in the same year dedicated to transformational Web 3.0 businesses from around the world. We worked with them for three intense months giving them access to our now 7-year-old venture platform of experts, mentors, and rich ecosystem to help them go from zero to one.
For that cohort, they were only one of four selected from hundreds of applicants. At a high level, they were chosen because of a strong fit with our belief that Decentralised Finance (DeFi) will eat the world and transform traditional financial products into trustless, transparent protocols, run without intermediaries. At the heart of that revolution powered by DLT, smart contracts and oracles is data, its trustworthiness, and quality. If we trust this new financial system to be run by code we need to ensure the data that drives its decisions is trustful.
Their unique proposition is to democratize the provision, access, and usage of digital financial asset data, by the wisdom and power of the crowd, similar to the critical role Wikipedia has played to the Web more generally. Their mission is to make financial data standardised, open-source and accessible to everyone, and on the same terms.
The exponential growth of projects like Maker, AAVE, Compound and Synthetix have created a growing demand for oracles to deliver critical fundamental data like asset prices. These oracles are one of the foundational building blocks for a DeFi ecosystem to function in an orderly way, professionalise and grow; to meet the requirements of a maturing market and DeFi’s true promise of transparency and independence.
To deliver on this vision DIA is creating an open-source, crowd-driven platform powered by blockchain technology that enables the supply, sharing and use of digital financial assets and other financial data. DIA is designed for individuals and entities that rely on accurate financial market data in their decision making, or who seek to gain a trading advantage from accurate digital financial assets data. This includes individual traders, financial services businesses, family offices, funds, financial institutions, and specialised app developers.
Incumbent financial information vendors often offer proprietary products without transparency and only little digital financial asset data. Existing information platforms rarely provide externally validated or enhanced data and their centralized information feeds are not tracked intelligently to ensure authenticity.
If DIA can improve the trustworthiness of DeFi and its data and make it available and more easily consumable, as they are doing in an easy to use API, they will drive trillions of dollars of capital inflow from institutions over the coming years and we will see the creation of billion-dollar financial products like indices, both for crypto and beyond, looking for yield in a complex macroeconomic environment. We believe this is a multi-billion dollar opportunity and one DIA and their team of seasoned financial service professionals and technologists are well-positioned to capture. As both an equity investor in DIA (the company) and the largest DIA token holder outside of the foundation itself we are excited to work with the team on unlocking what we hope to be explosive growth over the next decade.
To read more about DIA and their upcoming plans head to https://diadata.org/ and read more https://medium.com/dia-insights
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