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DIRT, a blockchain startup that plans to develop a trusted platform for structured data, has raised $3 million in a seed funding round. The San Francisco-based company said investment firms that participated in the round include General Catalyst, Greylock Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pantera Capital and others.

In a Medium post[1], the company, which describes itself as a "blockchain-based Wikipedia,” wants to make it "economically irrational" for false information to be shared. DIRT is looking to create a protocol for crowdsourcing information using the Ethereum blockchain to organize the world's data and make it freely accessible to everyone.

Flushed with cash, DIRT plans to release its protocol along with its token in the coming months. The tokens will be based on the Ethereum ERC20 standard, and they are central to the company’s plans to crowdsource trusted data at scale.

Speaking to Bitcoin Magazine, DIRT CEO Yin Wu said, "No single company should have a monopoly on information and truth. We're building DIRT because we believe structured data about the world needs to be freely available for new applications to emerge.”

“DIRT is doing to data what Wikipedia did to the encyclopedia — create a database of trusted information that is open and free."

Wu said the protocol would make it possible for third-party DApp developers to create a token curated registry[2] (TCR) similar to how Wikipedia uses its community to verify data.

"Token curated registries use economic incentives to crowdsource information on any topic. Creating lists is at the root of decision making: consider options, rank them, take action. DIRT makes it easy for communities to coordinate and build these lists for an arbitrary number of topics," she noted.

Crowdsourcing and Competition

DIRT plans to create a new way

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