Permission

Over the past decade, the Internet has become oligarchic and unfair. Dominated by big tech data monopolies, today’s digital economy is driven by an aggressive competition for the collection of individuals’ profile and behavioral data to be sold to third parties for targeted advertising. The tactics that have fueled Web 2.0 – surveillance, interruption, exploitation and monetization of personal data – are now deeply entrenched, with the centralization and cross-party use of data, without the individual’s meaningful consent, firmly built into the web’s business model.

Global regulations aimed at protecting consumers’ data, combined with Google’s impending ban on third-party cookies and Apple’s recent requirement that apps ” ask permission,” are forcing major changes to the $600 billion dollar digital advertising industry. Advertisers, agencies, and publishers – now majorly constrained in their ability to access and monetize consumer data – are scrambling to shift to a decentralized, consumer-centric era. To succeed in Web3, marketers need to adapt to an internet where individuals will own their data and where advertisers will need to obtain permission to interact with it.

Permission.io is a Web3 solution at the intersection of online advertising, loyalty rewards, and digital assets. The company has developed an innovative marketing platform, powered by the Permission Token (“ASK”), a proprietary digital asset that enables global advertisers to compliantly target users and offer a fair, permissioned value exchange for the use of their data. The platform returns data ownership to individuals by enabling them to monetize and securely grant permission for sharing their data across the digital ecosystem.

Permission’s core technology is a patent-pending crypto-rewards demand-side platform (DSP) with an integrated Consumer Data Platform (CDP), where advertisers run campaigns and reward users with tokenized rewards for granting permission to share data. Unlike intermediaries such as Google and Facebook that retain data in their walled gardens, Permission’s platform enables advertisers to build consent-based audiences and one-on-one relationships with individual consumers. Indeed, a core differentiator is that Permission gives advertisers the ability to grow their own opt-in databases to build loyalty and improve ROI.

By enabling relationship-building through the use of tokenized rewards, Permission is providing brands with a default gateway to Web3 and the foundation for next-generation consumer loyalty. Web2 loyalty programs are siloed, analog, coupon-based, and limited by a brand’s ability to innovate and implement new technology. Permission paves the way for marketers to go beyond the coupon framework and launch loyalty programs powered by a digital, fungible asset, tradable with low fees and high transaction speeds on the Polygon network. In addition, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can enable brand interactions by giving users ownership and portability of their identity and data. Users can permission their data in the form of an NFT to earn from brands across applications. Or, NFTs can simply be used as a collectible or game piece to foster loyalty in a broader engagement play.

Apart from Permission’s innovations in Web3 technologies and fundamental to its mission and value creation for all stakeholders, is Permission’s ability to provide permissioned visibility over an individual’s full dataset. Currently, personal data is trapped in silos and applications, stifling advertising and entrenching big tech’s domination. Permission’s proprietary query engine (“PermissionQE”), based on patented technology using Data Algebra, provides a mechanism for making individuals’ data universally accessible and usable in a protected way. Applying innovations in blockchain technology and Data Algebra, advertisers can now gain permissioned access to data across different databases, including 3rd party sources, enabling data interoperability.

The rise of decentralized applications and distributed ledger technologies point to a new web economy that respects and enables the monetization of individuals’ time and data. As these new technologies mature and become scalable, Web 2.0’s economy of Internet kings will be overtaken by an open, transparent and distributed Web3, where everyone is an owner and participant and where individuals have the opportunity to profit from their data and engagement.

Moreover, the advent of decentralized financial (“DeFi”) protocols afford enormous and exciting opportunities for Permission users. We see Permission as a natural onboarding vehicle for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of mainstream consumers to the extraordinary and disruptive innovation in finance that is DeFi. Indeed, the platform that enables individuals the world over to own, leverage, and earn meaningful yield on their data will capture enormous value. Permission intends to be that platform.

To realize this ambitious vision, we are creating products, applications and incentives that encourage technologists, developers, businesses, and consumers to build, contribute to, and expand the Permission ecosystem. We envision myriad vertical use cases (e.g., e-commerce, entertainment, gaming, health and wellness, market research, etc.), as well as tokenized representations of personal data in the form of NFTs, that are built on top of Permission standards and powered by ASK.