On Tuesday (January 21), Binance announced that it had invested in Numbers, a Taiwanese blockchain startup that is building “an open, transparent and traceable data system.”
According to Binance’s blog post, what the Numbers team has created is “a fully open-source application that assures data traceability and digital evidence, thus allowing individuals to own and monetize their personal data.” This decentralized app (DApp) is available on Exodus, the range of blockchain phones sold by HTC.
Here is what The Verge wrote about the Numbers DApp when reviewing the HTC Exodus (the first model in the Exodus series) in February 2019:
“The most interesting addition is an app called Numbers, which tracks user data on walking, sleeping, driving, and more, then allows you to sell your own data to third parties. The app, which is made by a startup based in Taiwan, displays what type of data your phone can track, as well as a list of companies interested in that data.
“The Numbers app is aimed at bringing more transparency around data collection and allowing users to make money — mainly in cryptocurrency — off their own data.”
Back then, Phil Chen, HTC’s Chief Decentralized Officer, had this to say about the Numbers DApp:
“Now not only can users own their data, but it forces companies to be more transparent about how that data is used.”
In addition to Binance, Numbers’ other partners include Bitmark, National Taiwan University, Stanford University, and University of Cambridge.
Gin Chao, Binance’s Strategy Officer, stated:
“The Numbers team has strong technical backgrounds and expertise in building blockchain applications with practical use cases. We are happy to have Numbers as part of the Binance ecosystem. Numbers app is integrated with Binance Chain through Zion, a hardware-based key management system and offers the developer community easy access to use the Binance Chain and for hardware wallet protection, digital signature and so on.”
And Bofu Chen, Co-Founder and CTO of Numbers, said:
“We want to help everyone to create traceable and trustworthy data through an open data framework. By trading such data, not only can individuals get a reasonable reward, but the society also benefits because we rebuild the trust and enhance the operational efficiency in the process. The investment from Binance will help us explore more use scenarios and accelerate technological and business development. We are also working to open the libraries we built for the developer community in 2020 so that more developers can leverage our work and use the Binance Chain with more ease.”
Featured Image Courtesy of Binance
