Multi-chain nonfungible token data aggregator CryptoSlam, backed by Mark Cuban and Reid Hoffman, is partnering with Animoca Brands to create SlamNet, a web3 data economy hoping to fuel blockchain-based uses for intelligence, commercial and financial applications.

SlamNet also aims to incentivize a community of creators that build upon its platforms in an attempt to decentralize web3 data.

“If you look at data companies in web3—CryptoSlam being right there with them—they are largely not decentralized,” Randy Wasinger, founder and chief executive officer of CryptoSlam said to me in a recent interview. “They may seem like they are, but they’re not.”

To help further that decentralization, CryptoSlam and Animoca have been working together since December 2023 on various aspects of SlamNet—including tokenomics, legal and strategic support.

“Animoca Brands is proud to contribute to SlamNet’s vision as its tokenomics architect,” Mohamed Ezeldin, head of tokenomics at Animoca Brands said. “This collaboration marks a pivotal moment for web3 because of the origin and maturity of the SlamNet ecosystem, which developed out of the need for NFT data and insights, and we’re excited to lend our support to its continued growth.”

Wasinger described data as “fuel,” which is outlined in SlamNet’s Litepaper. Just as power companies power homes with electricity, SlamNet aims to provide web3 with verified, accurate data.

With CryptoSlam, the company takes raw blockchain data and decodes it and then enriches it to help people tell the story of NFTs and web3. But by pulling the data off-chain, the company's data also doesn’t largely exist on-chain.

“The organizations that enrich the data are not decentralized,” Wasinger said. “The industry needs a governed entity—which we think is SlamNet—responsible for providing the fuel for web3.”

Terabytes of data from CryptoSlam and other data providers—across all major blockchains—will fuel each of SlamNet’s platforms. SlamLink will then be the pipeline for raw, decoded and enriched web3 data to fuel applications and bridge web3 with larger, traditional off-chain economies.

“Data shouldn’t be centralized or controlled by any one entity or handful of entities,” Wasinger said. “It should belong to the industry itself and should be governed as such. We as an industry have funded and supported all kinds of different companies doing largely similar, if not the same, things. Much like it’s more efficient to have one community governed entity pumping fuel into my house and other businesses in the real world, it is more efficient and optimal to have the exact same thing in web3.”

The types of individuals and entities that would most benefit from SlamNet would actually be—no surprise—data companies like CryptoSlam.

“The infrastructure that SlamNet provides will be a valuable asset to data companies by allowing them to monetize their data in ways that are currently not possible,” Wasinger said. “That’s true for CryptoSlam and will be true for other data companies that might provide other enriched data points that we do not.”

SlamNet will also provide web3 developers with a more robust and trusted source for web3 data.

“Right now, the data is very fragmented,” Wasinger said. “SlamNet will uniquely consolidate the data under one umbrella so it’s easier to find web3 data.

The data SlamNet will be able to consolidate will range from on-chain data—raw, encoded or enriched—to off-chain data.

“A good example of off-chain data is floor prices,” Wasinger said. “In many cases, if the marketplace isn’t on-chain, the floor price will be off-chain data. You have to trust that the data being fed into any sort of feed is accurate and up-to-date. SlamNet—through its curation and governance—will be able to help with all of that.”

Individual users can also benefit from SlamNet by being SLAM token holders. Just as traditional token holders of a project have a vested interest in the project itself, SLAM holders would similarly have a say in how SlamNet’s web3 data is used to benefit their unique interests.

“If a person is in the gaming industry and holds a lot of gaming NFTs, they can help support initiatives that help further the ability to provide transparency to games,” Wasinger said. “SlamNet would provide the fuel for that, developers can come in and build the applications on top of it, and token holders—who can be individuals—can uniquely help steer where those resources are headed.”

But who will own the data?

“The actual data itself would be owned by the data providers,” Wasinger said. “As the CEO of a data company [CryptoSlam], it’s still our data, but now we’ll have wider distribution and different rails in which to monetize that data.”

Wasinger said CryptoSlam has certain proprietary enriched data points that are valuable, but that the company is unable to fully monetize them because the rails don’t exist to do so. With SlamNet, they would.

“It’s the ability for our most uniquely valuable and desirable data to be accessible by a world of web3 developers who can build applications that are needed by the industry, and for us as a data provider to extract licensing fees for that data,” Wasinger said. “That’s where the big upside is for us as a data provider—and others as well—that want their data accessible in web3.”

lead image: Randy Wasinger