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 Holding Co. and certain subsidiaries filed voluntary Chapter 11 petitions on 23 March 2025 and the customer genomic database became an asset of the estate. The company's own annual report for the year ended 31 March 2025 sizes it at “approximately 14.4 million and 15.1 million PGS customers” for 2025 and 2024 – a fall it attributes “primarily as a result of customers electing to delete their data” – and reports that 80% of customers had consented to research.
It was auctioned in May 2025 among seven qualified bidders, and after a reopened round closed on 14 July 2025 at $305.0 million to TTAM Research Institute – a nonprofit affiliated with the company's co-founder and former CEO – “free and clear of liens, claims, encumbrances, and other interests.” 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, and the only lever an individual holds is deletion. See GenomesDAO for a vault design built specifically against this failure mode.
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.
A token governs who may use a dataset; the files still need somewhere to live, and two blockchain storage networks sell that on different terms. Filecoin is a market: a client agrees a deal with a storage provider covering size, price, duration and collateral, and the sectors holding the data have “a set lifespan that providers can extend before it expires”, so the data stays stored while someone extends it. The Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute reported in August 2023 that it had stored more than 125 TiB of cardiac research data there through the provider Distributed Storage Solutions, including raw image datasets from published papers.
Arweave charges once: an uploader pays upfront into a storage endowment sized for “200 years' worth of replicated storage at present prices”, and the endowment pays miners over time. CrimConsortium used it to move CrimRxiv, its open-access criminology repository, off a hosting platform due to close at the end of 2026, keeping the DOIs of more than 3,700 publications, according to a case study by ar.io, the gateway network it moved to.
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:
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.
Tokenising data does not make the underlying difficulties disappear, and honest coverage names them:
That last hazard is not hypothetical, and the sharpest case is the base layer named at the top of this section. Ocean's token was folded into the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance alongside Fetch.ai and SingularityNET – an arrangement Ocean itself describes as having been “founded on voluntary association and collaboration to promote decentralized AI through a token merger.” On 9 October 2025 the Ocean Protocol Foundation withdrew its designated directors and resigned as a member, and the same notice put numbers on what leaving costs the people who followed the token in: since July 2024 81% of the $OCEAN supply had been converted into $FET, 37,334 holders representing 270 million $OCEAN had not converted, and the conversion bridge was “fully managed and controlled by Fetch.ai” – the counterparty, not Ocean.
Ocean's own account of how it got there is long, partisan and contested. The data stack is unaffected – datatokens, data NFTs and compute-to-data were all still the live product when this page was checked on 9 September 2026 – but the token that pays for them spent eighteen months governed by an alliance its own foundation then walked out of. DAO mergers and token consolidations covers the mechanics and what a dissenting holder is actually left holding.
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. That record has one member-facing source – each ranked ballot mints one token against a sunk 100 XRD vote fee (VOTE_FEE and VOTE_MINT in contracts/logic/src/lib.rs), and buys and sells have minted none since the 11 September 2026 redeploy – and it is soulbound in the strict sense: it cannot be bought from another holder, sent, or delegated.
So control cannot be lifted off a seller in a single block, and it cannot be bought on the curve either. An outside buyer who wants weight has to turn up and vote, one ballot per proposal, alongside the contributors they would outvote. That slows capture rather than forbidding it: a large bag still multiplies whatever voting record its holder builds. That earned factor maps naturally onto the contribute-to-earn logic data unions already use. And every member who has voted 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. See also Rejuve.AI, an AI-longevity data union that rewards members for contributing health data.