5 Emerging Tokens Driving Data-Driven Web3 Innovation

Web3 has attracted tons of attention with its promise of transforming the internet by making it decentralized and putting control back into the hands of its users, but the real innovation lies in the way it leverages both blockchain and real-world data to power novel applications that aren’t possible in Web2 environments.

To discover what we mean, let’s check out five of the most intriguing projects that are taking the lead in terms of data-driven Web3 innovation and see why they’re likely to have a much bigger impact than most people realize. 

1: Arkham

A revolutionary blockchain intelligence protocol, Arkham aims to boost transparency in Web3 by deanonymizing transactions, helping users to understand the movement of crypto assets. 

The platform works by analyzing the masses of data generated by each blockchain to try and track how assets move, and the entities or individuals who are moving them. With its proprietary AI engine ULTRA, Arkham has shown an impressive ability to link blockchain wallet addresses to real-world people. The most popular use cases for Arkham include investigating exchange flows and transaction histories, DeFi forensics, unraveling swaps that utilize crypto mixers, the identification of individual’s portfolio holdings and analytics on entities such as crypto exchanges.

It operates as a decentralized marketplace for crypto intelligence, where ARKM tokens serve as the main currency for buying and selling blockchain information. It utilizes two economic models – bounties, where users stake ARKM tokens and request specific information, serving as an incentive for others to provide it, and auctions, where users will potentially valuable intelligence can sell it to the highest bidder. 

Arkham is an intriguing project that incentivizes forensic investigators to do what they do best, and the intelligence it unearths is likely to become extremely popular as the Web3 industry expands. 

2: Hivemapper 

Taking on Google Maps is no easy feat, but one possible way to do so is to offer every single driver in the world an incentive to help go about it. 

That’s what Hivemapper is doing. It has created a decentralized maps network that rewards users with HONEY tokens for downloading its mobile application and switching it on as they navigate the roads. The idea is to provide the most up-to-date information about road conditions, similar to how Google utilizes the data of Android smartphones. 

As users drive to wherever they’re going, they earn money for doing so, which is just about the best possible incentive there is to get people to contribute. To increase their earnings, users can purchase a specialized dashcam that also collects video data, improving Hivemapper’s maps even more. 

Hivemapper’s Mapping Network Foundation operates with a decentralized governance model, with HONEY token holders able to vote on any decisions concerning the network. It’s one of the most promising examples of a Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network or DePIN network to date. 

3: Space and Time

Space and Time wants to help blockchain applications interact with the real world, and to do this it has built a decentralized hybrid data warehouse that supports transactional queries and scalable analytics on any network, with low-latency and cryptographic verifiability. 

Each query is cryptographically secured by a novel consensus algorithm known as Proof-of-SQL, which uses zero-knowledge proofs to ensure the results are accurate and tamper-proof. It enables database queries to be executed only once while remaining provably correct for on-chain use. This makes it ideal for smart contracts that need to query real-time data sources and authenticate the results.  

Space and Time’s utility token SXT plays a big role, securing the network through staking, where validators are incentivized to provide only accurate data, while also giving holders the right to vote on protocol decisions. 

The project promises to be a game-changer for Web3, because by providing verifiable, real-time analytics of off-chain data, it can facilitate more sophisticated use cases for dApps that weren't possible before in areas such as gaming, data analytics, supply chain tracking, AI and cross-chain data orchestration. 

4: Nym 

Privacy protocol Nym aims to redefine internet security by protecting users from mass surveillance. It’s the creator of a “mixnet” that utilizes three encrypted privacy layers to mask all incoming data by making it look identical, as a way to prevent eavesdropping. 

It works by obscuring both data and metadata to mask user’s IP addresses, network traffic patterns. crypto wallets, transaction amounts and more, ensuring their internet activities are entirely private. 

Nym integrates with any blockchain and utilizes an innovative economic model, where users pay NYM tokens to send data through its mixnet. These payments are used to incentivize node operators through a Proof-of-Mixing consensus algorithm that works similarly to Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work, ensuring both decentralization and security. 

The real beauty of Nym is that it’s compatible with any blockchain-based application, including crypto payments, instant messaging and more, allowing any crypto user to safeguard themselves against surveillance. 

5: The Graph 

Most books have an index, which makes it easy for anyone picking it up to find the relevant page they’re looking for, and this is what The Graph is trying to do for blockchain. 

It’s the creator of an open-source blockchain indexing protocol that aims to make it faster and easier for dApps to query decentralized networks. It works by collecting, storing and organizing blockchain data to make it more discoverable for other users. 

By using The Graph, dApp developers can quickly find the information they’re looking for on any compatible blockchain network. Before, this was far from easy, as the chronological nature of blockchain-based data meant that dApps would have to scour the entire network every single time. 

The Graph stores blockchain data in a series of subgraphs that are accessible through standard APIs. These subgraphs are essentially indexes, which organize the data in a way that makes it more straightforward to query using the specialist GraphQL language. It also utilizes indexers and delegators, who are individuals that help to process the data and pass it on to end-users and applications in return for GRT token rewards.