Data portability is a commonly-repeated promise of crypto. “Take your followers and social graph across the internet.” “Bring your video game items across games and platforms.” “Log into any site with a single, unified identity.” These claims have excited builders and developers, but haven’t yet gone mainstream.

Recent platform shifts have highlighted the fragility of our digital lives. With talks of a potential TikTok ban, creators face losing years of content and audience relationships overnight. Meanwhile, as US consumers embrace new AI models like DeepSeek, built in China, they face similar questions about where their data lives and who might get access to it.

These are symptoms of a fundamental problem: users don’t truly own or control their data. We live on rented land.

Many of today’s leading crypto investors wrote about data portability and user sovereignty in the early days of Web2. This vision of an internet — where users, not platforms, control their digital lives — was one of the driving forces behind crypto. While crypto has succeeded in financial applications, this promise of portable data and a self-sovereign internet remains unfulf

Go to Source to See Full Article
Author: Anna Kazlauskas