In This Newsletter
Who Owns Your Data?
SEC Advances Crypto Capital-Raising Rules and Tokenized Fund Custody
Who Owns Your Data?
In April 2025, Dataprev, the Brazilian state-owned technology company that administers more than 60 million payroll-loan contracts, began allowing some of its customers to sell access to their own financial data and keep the proceeds. The pilot, called dWallet, deposits data generated by everyday transactions into a personal “data savings account,” and participants have reportedly earned around $50 a month once they accept a company’s bid for their information, according to Rest of World. Dataprev built the program with DrumWave, a Mountain View, California, data-monetization firm.
The incumbents in the data economy are more than 4,000 registered data brokers that operate in the United States alone, buying, aggregating, and reselling personal information. Worldwide data-broker revenue reached an estimated $278 billion in 2024, according to Grand View Research. These firms trade information that consumers generate for free every time they browse, shop, or carry a phone. However, the consumers themselves who generate that data capture almost none of that value. Data ownership has become a more active policy debate in part because of this unequal dynamic.
Web3, the term Ethereum Cofounder Gavin Wood coined in 2014, promised an infrastructural solution to data ownership. Web3 envisioned wallets and cryptographic keys replacing platform accounts, letting individuals hold their identity, assets, and data outside any single company’s servers. Parts of that vision have materialized in stablecoins, decentralized name systems, and decentralized autonomous organizations, but critics argue that Web3 has yet to reach the people it set out to empower. Jack Dorsey argued in 2021 that everyday users held little real ownership stake in Web3. Blockchain researchers have also pointed out that controlling a private key is not the same as controlling one’s underlying data: Many “self-sovereign” wallets still route access through a handful of centralized infrastructure providers, and a lost or stolen key can leave a user with no recourse at all.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers Thomas Hardjono and Alex Pentland proposed an alternative in their paper Data Cooperatives: Towards a Foundation for Decentralized Personal Data Management. It proposes that users turn to data cooperatives, which are member-owned organizations structured like credit unions. They hold personal data on behalf of members, negotiate with companies on their behalf, and share the value back with them. A broader family of these “data intermediary” models, including data unions, data trusts, and data commons, has emerged since then, particularly in the United Kingdom and the European Union. The innovation foundation Nesta helped launch the First International Data Union in 2025 to give people collective bargaining power over the conversations and content that AI companies use to train models. DrumWave, the company behind the Brazil pilot, sells a commercial version of the same idea: a Data Savings Account and dWallet platform that certifies personal data as a tradable asset, called a data certificate, and lets individuals license it directly to companies.
As data brokers, data unions, and Web3 vie for market share, the data industry increasingly operates against very different legal backdrops on either side of the Atlantic. The European Union has regulated personal data comprehensively since the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, took effect in 2018, requiring companies to obtain affirmative, opt-in consent before most data collection begins. The United States has no federal equivalent: Twenty-four states, led by California’s Consumer Privacy Act, have passed their own privacy statutes as of August 2026, according to Chambers and Partners, each with different thresholds and rules, and the prevailing US approach lets companies collect and share data by default unless a consumer opts out.
SEC Advances Crypto Capital-Raising Rules and Tokenized Fund Custody
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed a new rule on August 18 that would let crypto startups raise money without the standard registration process required of a public stock offering. The proposal, called Regulation Crypto Assets, creates two exemptions from the Securities Act of 1933: a one-time exemption for offerings of up to $5 million over a four-year period, aimed at very early-stage projects, and a recurring exemption for up to $75 million every 12 months, which would require issuers to publish financial statements and file ongoing reports. The rule also creates a conditional safe harbor that would allow a crypto asset to shed its classification as an “investment contract” and avoid securities regulation once its issuer demonstrates that the product is sufficiently decentralized.
SEC Chairman Paul Atkins framed the proposal as a sequel to the Commission’s March 2026 interpretive guidance, which for the first time sorted crypto assets into categories, including digital commodities, collectibles, tools, stablecoins, and digital securities, with only the last category automatically triggering securities law. Atkins called the new rule a step to “onshore innovation in crypto asset markets,” while the CLARITY Act remains stalled in the Senate. The proposal would also preempt state securities registration requirements for offerings made under its exemptions.
Six days earlier, the SEC’s Division of Investment Management took a narrower but consequential step in the same direction, granting Franklin Templeton relief from part of a decades-old custody rule for one of its blockchain-based funds. The August 12 no-action letter lets Franklin Templeton’s registered mutual funds and exchange-traded funds hold shares of the Franklin OnChain US Government Money Fund (ticker FOBXX, marketed as BENJI), a tokenized government money-market fund that uses the Stellar blockchain to record transactions, without complying with three provisions of Rule 17f-2 under the Investment Company Act of 1940 that assume securities sit in a physical vault. In exchange, Franklin Templeton Investor Services, the fund’s transfer agent, must retain the private keys to each fund’s blockchain wallet and meet compliance and auditing obligations.
The relief lets Franklin Templeton’s traditional funds use BENJI for cash management and as securities-lending collateral, taking advantage of features such as hourly net asset value calculations and intraday trading that its existing cash vehicles do not offer. Because the letter reflects only the position of SEC staff on enforcement, not a Commission rule, it applies narrowly to Franklin Templeton’s specific structure. Other asset managers pursuing tokenized funds, including BlackRock, Ondo Finance, and Hashnote, would need to demonstrate comparable safeguards or seek their own relief. However, they now have a valuable public template to follow. Tokenized money market funds across all issuers held roughly $22 billion in combined assets as of May, up about 75 percent from a year earlier.