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AI Shows Why Data Portability Matters

Data portability is a commonly-repeated promise of crypto. “Take your followers and social graph across the internet.” “Bring your video game items across games and platforms.” “Log into any site with a single, unified identity.” These claims have excited builders and developers, but haven’t yet gone mainstream.
Recent platform shifts have highlighted the fragility of our digital lives. With talks of a potential TikTok ban, creators face losing years of content and audience relationships overnight. Meanwhile, as US consumers embrace new AI models like DeepSeek, built in China, they face similar questions about where their data lives and who might get access to it.
These are symptoms of a fundamental problem: users don’t truly own or control their data. We live on rented land.
Many of today’s leading crypto investors wrote about data portability and user sovereignty in the early days of Web2. This vision of an internet — where users, not platforms, control their digital lives — was one of the driving forces behind crypto. While crypto has succeeded in financial applications, this promise of portable data and a self-sovereign internet remains unfulfilled.
We’ve seen many attempts: NFTs letting you bring items across games, decentralized social networks like Farcaster and Bluesky promising portable social graphs, and verifiable identity standards. None have (yet) seen widespread adoption.
The reality? While early internet thinkers care deeply about the principles of data sovereignty, most users have a simpler question: What can I actually do with it?
Without AI, most data is only relevant within the walled gardens of the platform it’s on. With AI, it becomes a valued digital commodity and a tool to power nearly every application. Your message history helps AI understand your writing style, your preferences, and your relationships. With many users storing their data in self-sovereign wallets, developers can build AI experiences that are truly personalized. AI finally provides the “why” on data portability, in the form of a better product experience rather than ideology alone.
There is still a cold start problem. It’s inconvenient for users to connect their data. And for developers, the mindset today is: if you convince users to upload their data to your platform, why would you make it easy for them to take it elsewhere? This creates a cycle where each new platform becomes another walled garden, recreating the very problem they set out to solve.
This is where new incentive structures could finally break the extractive cycle. DataDAOs create an immediate opportunity for users to port their data through financial incentives, solving the cold start problem, so long as the data is onboarded in a self-sovereign, interoperable way, like on Vana. As more users bring their data into these interoperable systems, developers can build applications that weren’t possible before.
Imagine a personalized health coach that can analyze your sleep data from Oura, your workouts from Strava, your nutrition from food delivery apps, and your stress levels from communication patterns.
Or, an AI assistant that truly understands you because it can access your complete digital history while maintaining your privacy through granular permissions.
This solves a critical problem that has plagued past attempts at data portability. Users won’t export their data without clear benefits, and developers won’t build for portable data without users. Data DAOs break this deadlock by making it immediately worthwhile for users to connect data.
More importantly, once users make their data self-sovereign, entirely new kinds of applications become possible. AI agents can access your complete digital history to provide truly personalized experiences. Developers can build applications that combine data in ways that weren’t possible when it was siloed across platforms.
We know there’s a lot of demand for AI training data – many major model providers are poised to hit a data wall soon, making them search for publicly unavailable datasets to train newer, higher-performing models. New models like DeepSeek have shown the value of high quality data, with carefully curated human-generated examples to bootstrap their novel training method. At the same time, user data policies like GDPR and CCPA legally require platforms to allow users to export their data in a usable, standardized format. Networks like Vana allow users to monetize their data by collectively bargaining with model trainers in need of valuable training data no longer available on the public internet, and make it interoperable for true data sovereignty.
Two forces converging – the proliferation of AI, and new financial incentives – create the potential for both users and developers to benefit from data portability. The interests of users, developers, and data networks finally align. Users gain immediate value plus better AI experiences, developers get access to rich user data to build new applications, and networks grow stronger with each new participant.
For the first time, we have both the technology to make data portability valuable and the incentives to drive adoption.
Crypto has yet to deliver on its original promise of a self-sovereign, interoperable internet where users own their data, unfettered by Web2’s walled gardens. By creating financial incentives to bring data onboard and leveraging AI’s capabilities, we finally have a window of opportunity to make the internet truly user-owned.
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Canary Capital Files for Tron ETF With Staking Capabilities

Canary Capital is looking to launch an exchange-traded fund (ETF) tracking the price of Tron’s native token, TRX, according to a filing.
The hedge fund submitted a Form S-1 for the Canary Staked TRX ETF with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Friday. As the name suggests, the fund — if approved — would stake portions of its holdings.
This would be done through third-party providers, with BitGo acting as custodian for the assets. The fund would track TRX’s spot price using CoinDesk Indices calculations.
A proposed ticker as well as the management fee for the product have not been shared yet.
Issuers had initially filed applications for spot ethereum (ETH) ETFs with the staking feature included but removed them in an amended filing later in order to receive approval from the SEC on their proposals.
While the SEC under former Chair Gary Gensler was strictly against staking, issuers have grown more hopeful that they will be able to add the feature to their spot ether funds, among others, with the appointment of crypto-friendly Chair Paul Atkins.
A decision on a February request from Grayscale to allow staking in the Grayscale Ethereum Trust ETF (ETHE) and the Grayscale Ethereum Mini Trust ETF (ETH) was postponed by the regulator just a few days ago.
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Feds Mistakenly Order Estonian HashFlare Fraudsters to Self-Deport Ahead of Sentencing

Just four months ahead of their criminal sentencing for operating a $577 million cryptocurrency mining Ponzi scheme, the two Estonian founders of HashFlare were seemingly mistakenly ordered to self-deport by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — an instruction that directly contradicted a court order for the men to remain in Washington state until they are sentenced in August.
In a joint letter to the court last week, lawyers for Sergei Potapenko and Ivan Turogin told District Judge Robert Lasnik of the Western District of Washington that both men had received “disturbing communications” from DHS ordering them to leave the country immediately.
“It is time for you to leave the United States,” an email to Potapenko and Turogin dated April 11 read. “DHS is terminating your parole. Do not attempt to remain in the United States — the federal government will find you. Please depart the United States immediately.”
The email, included with the letter filed last week, threatened both men with “criminal prosecution, civil fines, and penalties and any other lawful options available to the federal government” if they stayed in the country. It resembles emails that undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens alike have received over the past few days.
Ironically, Potapenko and Turogin are not in the U.S. of their own volition — they were extradited from their native Estonia at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice in 2022 on an 18-count indictment tied to their HashFlare scheme. Though they initially pleaded not guilty to all charges, in February they both pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, and agreed to forfeit over $400 million in assets. They have both been in the Seattle area on bond since last July.
“Although there is nothing Ivan and Sergei would want more than to immediately go home, they understood that they are also under Court order to remain in King County,” wrote Mark Bini, a partner at Reed Smith LLP and lead counsel for Potenko, wrote in the pair’s joint letter to the court. Bini did not respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment.
In his letter, Bini said DHS’s emails had caused both Potapenko and Turogin «significant anxiety.”
“We and our clients have all seen recent news. Immigration authorities make mistakes, and individuals who should not be in custody end up in custody, sometimes even deported to places where they should not be deported,” Bini wrote.
Six days after Bini’s letter to the judge, the DOJ filed its own letter with the court saying that prosecutors had coordinated with DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division and secured a year-long deferral to the self-deportation order.
“This should provide ample time for the sentencing to take place,” the prosecution’s letter said.
DHS did not respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment.
Potapenko and Turogin are slated to be sentenced on August 14 in Seattle. Their lawyers have said that they will request to be sentenced to time served, meaning no additional time in prison, and to be sent home to Estonia “immediately.”
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CoinDesk Weekly Recap: EigenLayer, Kraken, Coinbase, AWS

Following last week’s tariff-caused drama, this was a relatively quiet week in crypto. Bitcoin remained stable around $84k. The CoinDesk 20, which tracks about 80% of the market, was up about 4% in the last seven days — i.e. nothing historic.
Still, plenty happened. On Tuesday, much of crypto went offline because of a tech issue at AWS, showing how the decentralized economy isn’t always that decentralized. Shaurya Malwa reported the news early. Bitcoin and other major cryptos slipped on bad news for Nvidia, Omkar Godbole reported.
Mantra, a project focused on real world assets, lost 90% of its value. Explanations varied (the company said it was due to “force liquidations” exchanges).
Meanwhile, EigenLayer, a restaking leader, rolled out a “slashing” feature meant to address security concerns (Sam Kessler reported). OKX, a major exchange, announced plans to set up in California following a $500 million settlement with the SEC over claims it operated previously in the U.S. without a money transmitter license. Cheyenne Ligon had that story.
In less good news, Kraken laid off “hundreds” of staff ahead of an expected IPO. And Coinbase became embroiled in a “front running controversy” linked to a curiously named token on its Base L2. Privacy advocates reacted with alarm to rumors that Binance was about to delist Zcash following a long decline in the value of privacy coins.
In D.C. news, Jesse Hamilton reported on a new wave of crypto lobbyists flooding the capital. Some asked if there are now too many trade groups and whether they really all could be effective.
Friends With Benefits, a buzzy social club for creative technologists, launched a new program to build Web3 products for music, film, publishing and other fun activities. (I wrote that one.)
Of course, there was plenty happening in the economy and markets (Trump’s disgust for Fed chair Powell fed into the unease). But, in crypto, it was pretty much business as usual. Fortunes won, fortunes lost, fortunes deferred.
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