O-DE Capital (‘OCP’) announces its investment in Verida, a layer zero DePIN ecosystem that combines the performance and privacy of traditional databases with user controlled keys for complex DApps.

OCP announces today its investment into Verida Network, which was deployed earlier this year in Q1 2024.

Verida is a decentralized infrastructure and ecosystem for private user databases, allowing users to gain control and ownership of their personal data with the benefits of both compliance and digital privacy. To date, Verida has secured over 20 ecosystem partners including Polygon ID, NEAR, Partisia, Redbelly, zkPass, Kima, Nillion, and cheqd, and continues to grow its network within the industry. The infrastructure is comprised of three pillars that have been in development for the last four years:

1. Verida Network, the encrypted decentralized database network for storage of private data within physical node infrastructure;
2. Verida Wallet, the user-facing wallet app available on iOS and Android. This is the container in which you can hold your personal assets and data in a decentralized and private way, using your device as decentralized storage, and providing you with the ability to interact with any dApp built on or compatable with Verida Network; and lastly,
3. The $VDA native utility token sits at the heart of the infrastructure, powering the self-sovereign data economy. $VDA can be used to pay for storage of your personal data, or the personal data of your users if you’re an application. On the opposite side of this are storage node operators who earn $VDA by securing the network and supplying storage capacity.

Verida was founded October 2019 by Adelaide-based founders, Chris Were and Ryan Kris.

Chris is an Australian based technology entrepreneur with more than fifteen years of background in cryptography, and has spent over 20 years devoted to bringing innovative software solutions to market. He has applied technology skills across finance, media, and healthcare industries. In 2018, Chris pioneered the technical research and development of the Verida protocol. He continues to shape the technical architecture and direction of Verida, driving the necessary innovation required for mass adoption of self-sovereign technologies.

Ryan has spent the last 20 years in business operations, program delivery and consulting roles across finance, telco, cyber security, and blockchain. At his previous role at BDO Blockchain, Ryan spearheaded client engagements, technical deployment and best practices for blockchain audit, risk and cyber security engagements across the firm. As COO at Verida, Ryan manages the strategic operations of the business, including finance, team, partners, marketing, and community.

Verida’s stated mission is that everyone has a fundamental human right to own and control personal data.

Verida’s guiding objectives sets out to enable privacy and self-sovereignty for off-chain identity, reputation, and personal data via Web3 means. OCP recognizes immediate and practical use cases, such as zero-knowledge credentialing for patients and healthcare systems, increasing security of health record data for patients, and eliminating liability risks of healthcare networks from having to store sensitive healthcare data, as one obvious example. We also see concerning macro-trends in the manipulation and control of social media, as well as the proliferation of content that is becoming increasingly harder to verify for authenticity in the advent of advancing generative AI, both which we believe are problems that can be addressed through Verida’s infrastructure and the use of blockchain.

Chris Were, co-founder and CEO, elaborates his beliefs about Verida;

“Verida’s mission has always been about allowing individuals to own and be in control of their personal data — enabling their data to benefit them. With investor support from OCP we aim to further growth and extend the Verida network to support privacy-preserving AI which needs access to private data for truly a personalised AI future.”

Verida has to-date secured $5M of private funding from backers amongst OCP such as Gate Labs, HASH CIB, Bison, Amesten Capital, Launchub, Capture Alpha, and have recently listed on major exchanges Gate.io and MEXC.

We are thrilled to share OCP’s third investment announcment in support of Verida. We’re excited to join the personal data revolution with Verida.

O-DE Capital Partners (‘OCP’) is a venture capital investing in “Web3 grounded in reality”. We believe Web3 and Web2 must work hand-in-hand to unlock scalable value for its intended users: people.

We call it Web 2.5. Our focus is investing in Web2 businesses that leverage the utility offered by Web3 networks to unlock scalable value in a fully-compliant framework, or investing in decentralized Web3 networks themselves which may bring additive value for millions of users existing in centralized applications.

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