Memory is pleased to announce its initial investment round to accelerate and scale the user-owned data layer for the internet.

Thank you to Coinbase Ventures’ Base Ecosystem Fund, Robot Ventures, Consensys Mesh, Seed Club and NoiseDAO for believing in the vision from the earliest inception.

Our digital lives are owned, monetized and controlled by a few large companies. Despite generating billions in value from our data, none of that is ever shared back to us.

Worse, our experience online is fragmented. Our digital identities and memories are trapped on siloed platforms, forcing us to start over on every new app, website or LLM. 

Memory is designed to fix this, with a new model for data monetization and data portability.

• For users: a Memory Vault where you own your data, earn when it’s queried, and take it with you between apps and LLMs.

• For builders: a tool stack to build with open data legos, no more reliance on building your user profiles from scratch.

Today, Memory is powering a number of products, including Factory.fm — a music review iOS app that was just featured as Apple's App of the Day — and Farcaster mini apps like Followcast.

Revenue and rewards are being distributed to users every Friday via a fee router on Base, with ~$15k distributed in the last two weeks.

This is the oldest problem on the internet, but for the first time there’s a small window of opportunity to change a core online model, brought about by the convergence of crypto and AI technologies:

• Onchain micropayments to share revenue with users.

• zkTLS to securely verify data from multiple sources.

• LLMs demand portable data for better context.

• x402 to accept agentic micropayments.

Founded by Jack Spallone (former Consensys) and RAC (first album on Ethereum, 2017), Memory combines these elements to create a user-owned data layer for the new internet.

The initial funds into Memory are being used to develop Memory Protocol V0 and accelerate adoption among consumer apps. V0 is the earliest phase of Memory’s data layer, giving developers access to aggregated public data, and sharing revenue with users automatically.

Live today, builders and AI agents can query public identity and social data for any internet user. An early group of apps are using Memory V0 to create hyper-personalized onboarding experiences that feel like magic data portability — such as Followcast which automatically syncs your Twitter follows to Farcaster.

Users are paid a revenue share in $MEM direct to their Memory Vault whenever their public data is queried by the API. They don’t even have to do anything.

In the future, users will be invited to upload rich personal data (LLM chat history, music preferences, health and fitness data), unlocking data portability for users, and a fully decentralized open data marketplace for apps to access.

All types of data will be monetized, with incentives for curating high-quality data sets. In preparation for this future, agentic payments and automatic rev-share are built in from day one.