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ELI5 (Explain Like I’m 5)

Imagine you’re a kid with a lemonade stand, and you created a special recipe that everyone loves. Now, big companies are taking pictures of your recipe, selling it to others, and making lots of money - but they’re not sharing any of that money with you.

That’s not fair, right?

H/T Midjourney for this fabulous illustration (with typos).

This is exactly what’s happening with data today:

• People create valuable content on platforms like Reddit and Twitter
• Big companies collect and sell this data (to AI use-cases - Reddit signed a $203M in 2024)
• The original creators get nothing in return

Chakra is building a fair marketplace where:

• If someone uses your data, you get paid
• It’s cheaper to store and process data
• Everyone knows exactly how their data is being used

It’s like creating a new lemonade marketplace where:

1. You can sell your recipe directly
2. You get paid every time someone uses it
3. It costs less to run your stand
4. Everything is clear and fair for everyone

Wow - what a beautiful world we can live in if Chakra meets its mission.

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The Data Economy Today

The current data marketplace ecosystem faces several fundamental challenges that affect both individual users and enterprises:

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User Data Rights

A significant ethical and economic challenge exists in how user-generated data is handled:

• Content creators receive minimal compensation for their data contributions
• Platforms sell user data without revenue sharing (e.g., Reddit’s $200M data deal)
• Limited transparency in how user data is monetized
• No standardized framework for data rights and compensation

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Enterprise Challenges

Traditional data platforms like Snowflake and Databricks present several obstacles for organizations:

• Complex procurement processes for data acquisition, specifically for the datasets that actually matter like Twitter / Reddit
• High operational costs for data storage and transformation - Snowflake / Databricks charge 80% product gross margins, spend for most start-ups / SMBs is way too high
• Limited monetization opportunities for proprietary datasets. Too hard to share data into the hands of the right, paying customer

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Market Opportunity

The data marketplace landscape is ripe for innovation due to several factors:

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Technological Evolution

We are finally at the right time to build a data warehouse using blockchain primitives.

Notably, you need two things to build an effective data warehouse - storage and compute. The modern hyperscaler has had both of these primitives since the early 2000s - only over the last 12-18 months have we bootstrapped these primitives in crypto.

The key primitives that enable Chakra’s data warehouse are:

Primitive	Provider	Benefits
Decentralized Storage (specifically a hot datalake)	Impossible Cloud & Akave (built on Filecoin)	- Up to 80% cost reduction vs. AWS S3 - No egress costs - Enterprise-grade durability (11 9’s) - Geographic data sovereignty - Pay-as-you-go pricing
Decentralized Compute	Akash Network, AWS (back-up)	- Up to 85% cost savings vs. AWS EC2 - Global compute marketplace - Automatic failover - Native container orchestration

These foundational technologies enable us to provide:

• High-performance storage solutions
• Cost-effective compute capabilities
• Enterprise-grade SLA guarantees
• Reduced operational costs (up to 70% savings)

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Business Model Innovation

The market demands new approaches to:

• Data ownership and rights management
• Fair compensation for data creators
• Efficient data procurement, ingestion, and transformation
• Enterprise data monetization

Chakra addresses these challenges through our product suite that properly aligns incentives between enterprises, users, and content creators.

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System Architecture (Alpha)