About Dataswift
Our mission is to unlock the value of data. For everyone.
Dataswift is a data technology network group with a mission to unlock the value of data for everyone. We do so by enabling everyone (Individuals, SMEs and Corporations) to produce, store, process, share and use self-sovereign data, a special class of data where data subjects are data processors and controllers.
Our technology business support our clients to separate their applications from their data with a data wallet, creating optimal solutions that combine centralized functionalities with decentralized data processing, thus unlocking the true potential of their data.
Our network business help our clients build data ecosystems with self-sovereign data, to improve customer engagement, reduce churn and launch high impact purpose-led campaigns.
Our consulting practice assist organisations in their data and digital transformation, combining the best centralized and self-sovereign architectures to achieve impactful outcomes.
Our partners provide specialised capabilities to enable easier access, higher speeds and better quality of self-sovereign data on the network.
We believe that in the future, every person and organization will want Data Accounts to function efficiently in the digital economy. Data Accounts will be as fundamental as bank accounts, and data transactions as fundamental as payment transactions.
We are a commercial spin-out from a >$10m research programme of 8 U. K. universities to emerge the Data Economy 2.0.
Problem, Solution & Product
The Data Portability Problem
Today, more than 120 countries in the world have data regulation protecting the privacy and rights of individuals. This has resulted in unscalable data sharing between centralized systems where service and data components are tightly coupled. Data as a productive asset is failing to be realized.
The Solution: Separate data from services and decentralize data to customers
Decentralizing data to customers would free customer data from constraints, as customers can transport the data to partners, while producers of data can maintain the source of truth.
Our Flagship Product
Dataswift has created a system to enable self-sovereign data storage and licensing, allowing individuals to directly license their data to partner apps and websites on demand to achieve “data at the speed of money”. Dataswift enables safe contracts and standardizes the transactions between Data Accounts and apps/websites for all data types, so that our clients can benefit from having next-generation ”Web3” Data Wallet for their application or website to create their own ecosystems with their partners.
Our value proposition – We help build and scale our clients’ ecosystems to:
- transact on data assets without the need for complex legal/tech integration with partners by enabling customers to bring their own verified data assets (E.g. health records or KYC);
- grow revenues when customers use data with their partners;
- access resources (eg. sharing a credit score) or reduce fraud (eg. verifying their benefit status); and
- generate collective action and impact by using their data ecosystem for coordination.
Our History
Dataswift's history begins with the story of the "HAT".
In May 2013, a group of academics from six universities and diverse disciplines – economics, computing, operations management, strategy, design informatics – came together at Warwick University. They were meeting about their £1.2 million UK-government-funded project, whose purpose was to engineer and design a multi-sided market for personal data – one where an individual's data would be owned by the individual. This project was dubbed "The HAT" (Hub-of-All-Things).
May 2013 – Nov 2015: HAT Research Project
It took 2.5 years to get the HAT from concept to reality. An Industry Advisory Board was created to help solidify thinking on the HAT economic and market models. "Mad Hatters' Tea Parties" and HAT Meetups were held to engage with developers, industry and policymakers. Countless presentations were made at academic conferences and industry events to inspire a community of personal data advocates.
In July 2014, the HAT project created its first database schema and released it to the public domain. By the time the HAT project ended in November 2015, the Alpha HAT Microserver was ready, along with 6 briefing papers on how the ecosystem should be designed and built.
Nov 2015 – Aug 2019: HATDeX and HATCF
The "HAT Foundation" – the collective name comprising of Dataswift and the HAT Community Foundation (HCF) – was officially launched in February 2016 at an event at The Shard in London, where a HAT platform capable of collecting, controlling, re-combining, contextualizing and sharing personal data was unveiled.
The job of globally rolling out HAT Microservers went to Dataswift Ltd, which held the software IP for the transaction engine and the deployment of HAT Microservers in the cloud. At the same time, the HCF was tasked with regulating the transaction ecosystem. Over the following three years, the technology system continued to be developed, along with the legal and economic model.
Sep 2019: Dataswift
Dataswift secured a £1.8m seed round raise in September 2019, led by IQ Capital with participation from Pacific & Orient Properties Ltd, Alphanumeric Corporation and Delin Ventures.
Today, the Dataswift ecosystem is growing, rolling out Data Accounts across FinTech, HealthTech and other industries. Our academic partners lead on use cases on digital transformation, innovation, and impact with >$31m of grants in 2021.
