The problem: the people who make the data rarely own it

Scientific progress runs on data — genomes, clinical measurements, sensor streams, browsing and behavioural traces. Yet the people and institutions who generate that data almost never control it or share in the value extracted from it. A research participant hands over a sample and gets a one-time payment, if anything; a patient's records are locked inside a hospital system; a consumer's DNA sits on a company's servers under a terms-of-service agreement they cannot renegotiate. The value accrues to whoever holds the database.

What that concentration means in practice was made vivid in 2025, when 23andMe filed for bankruptcy and the genetic data of roughly 15 million customers was treated as a corporate asset to be sold to the highest bidder. The database ultimately sold for about $305 million to TTAM Research Institute, a nonprofit founded by the company's own former CEO — a transfer of the most sensitive data imaginable, decided in a courtroom rather than by the people whose DNA it was. It is the sharpest illustration of the core problem decentralised science takes aim at: when data ownership is centralised, the terms can change without the consent of the people the data describes.

Data as an ownable, governable asset

The web3 answer is to represent a dataset as something you can hold, permission, and trade without giving up custody of the underlying records. Ocean Protocol's datatokens are the clearest example: each published dataset is paired with an ERC‑20 datatoken that acts purely as an access-control key, while a data NFT represents the base ownership right. Holding and spending the datatoken grants access to the data; the data itself never has to go on-chain and can stay on the owner's own storage. Ownership, licensing, and access all become programmable, which is precisely what lets a group of people pool and govern data collectively.

This turns two things that were previously trapped inside a single company into shared, tradeable objects: the right to the data and the revenue from licensing it. It is the data analogue of the IP-NFT pattern DeSci already uses for patents and research IP — ownership of an intangible asset made liquid and collectively holdable.

Data DAOs and data unions in practice

A Data DAO is a collective that owns or manages data assets on behalf of its members, pooling many individually-worthless contributions into a dataset with real market value and governing the terms of access together. Several distinct models exist:

• Ocean Protocol — the base layer for tokenised data. Its compute-to-data mechanism lets a buyer run an algorithm against a private dataset and receive only the result, so a DAO can monetise sensitive data for AI training without the raw records ever leaving the owner's server.
• GenomesDAO — genomic-data ownership built on encrypted-vault infrastructure (AMD SEV hardware enclaves). Individuals keep their sequenced DNA in a private vault and are paid each time a researcher queries it, rather than selling it outright to a sequencing company.
• Data unions (Streamr) — opt-in pools of real-time personal data where a smart contract splits buyer revenue among all contributors. The browser extension Swash grew into one of the largest, with over 200,000 users selling their aggregated browsing data collectively rather than surrendering it to ad networks for free.

The common thread is the same one that defines a DeSci DAO: a shared asset (here, the data and the revenue it earns) owned by many, with the rules of access decided by governance rather than by a single custodian.

The hard problems

Tokenising data does not make the underlying difficulties disappear, and honest coverage names them:

• Privacy and re-identification. Genomic and health data can never be truly anonymised — a genome identifies not only you but your relatives. Compute-to-data and hardware enclaves reduce exposure but do not eliminate the risk that a determined buyer re-identifies contributors from query results.
• Valuation. A single person's data is nearly worthless; value only emerges at aggregate scale, which makes it genuinely hard to price any one contribution fairly and easy for a marketplace to under-reward the people supplying the raw material.
• Regulation. Selling or transferring personal data collides with GDPR, HIPAA, and a growing patchwork of state genetic-privacy laws — some of which, as the 23andMe objections showed, treat consent as non-transferable regardless of what a token says.
• Governance capture. If control of a data collective is a freely-bought token, an outside buyer can accumulate it and outvote the very contributors whose data gives the pool its worth — the classic DAO failure, applied to data.

Where DeSci — and Caper — fit

Data ownership is the third leg of the DeSci agenda alongside funding and IP: fund the work, own the resulting IP, and let the people who generate the data keep and govern it. The data-custody layer — datatokens, compute-to-data, encrypted vaults — solves how a dataset is held and accessed. It leaves open a second question that is pure governance: once a collective owns a valuable pool of data and the revenue it earns, who decides the terms, and can a contributor who disagrees leave with their share?

How Caper approaches this. Caper is a DAO protocol, not a data-storage layer — it would sit underneath a data collective as the funding-and-governance rail, next to (not instead of) an Ocean- or GenomesDAO-style custody stack. Its relevance is to the last problem above. A caper's decisive governance weight is (t · v) / (V · T) — your token share multiplied by your share of an earned, non-transferable soulbound vote token minted one-per-ballot and impossible to buy. So an outside buyer cannot simply accumulate the token and seize control of the pool; decisive weight also requires a record of having actually participated. That earned factor maps naturally onto the contribute-to-earn logic data unions already use. And every member holds a clamped exit right: a contributor who dislikes where the collective is taking its data can redeem their share of the treasury and leave, rather than being trapped in a pool whose direction they lost a vote on.

Two honest caveats. Caper governs the shared treasury and decisions, not the data itself — the privacy and custody guarantees still come from the data layer, not the DAO. And its weight is not purely earned: t is a genuine capital term, so a large holder still carries real weight — the earned vote token bounds capture, it does not abolish the influence of size.