Eight years ago, on 30 June 2018, the Ontology MainNet went live. It has run without interruption ever since. Anniversaries are usually a moment to look back, and there is plenty to look back on: an identity framework shipped early, a wallet used in more than 170 countries, a network that has settled tens of millions of transactions. But the more useful thing to do on our eighth birthday is to say clearly where we are going next. The next chapter is about identity, data ownership, and AI, and it runs through one product: ONTO Wallet.
The short version is this. AI is resetting the value of data, and the kind of data it needs most is the hardest to source responsibly: high-quality, consent-based information that is provably created by a real person. Ontology has spent eight years building the infrastructure that can supply exactly that. Now we are putting it to work.
The data problem AI is about to hit
AI systems are only as good as the data they learn from. For years that data came from web scraping, but the industry is moving away from scraped content toward high-quality human data. Synthetic data can scale human judgement, but it cannot replace it. What AI increasingly needs is verified human data: information that is high-quality, consent-based, and provably created by a real person, sourced in a way enterprises can stand behind.
The supply of that data is the problem. Today the people who create data rarely share in its value. By Ontology’s own analysis, Meta, Alphabet and Amazon alone have earned more than 1.3 trillion US dollars from user-generated data, while the individuals behind it receive nothing.
Regulation is moving the other way. Frameworks such as the EU Data Act are pushing enterprises toward first-party, user-consented data. The missing piece has been a way to prove data is authentic and human without exposing it. That is the gap Ontology has spent eight years preparing to fill.
ONTO Wallet: from holding assets to owning data
ONTO Wallet is the centre of the strategy. It remains a multi-chain Web3 wallet, and it is now building on that foundation to add an identity and verified human data platform. People own the data they create, build a verified profile, and earn rewards by contributing data on their own terms. On the other side of the marketplace, projects in AI, gaming and Web3 gain access to verified human data, a resource that is in growing demand and hard to source responsibly.
The platform rests on capabilities Ontology has built over its eight years, now native to the wallet: decentralised identity through ONT ID, and software-only verification that confirms data is authentic and human without exposing the underlying information. No special hardware is required.
It is organised around four ideas:
Ownership: people own the personal data they create.
Identity, the core differentiator: verifiable identity is what lets a person prove who they are and what they have done.
Utility: real rewards and a working data marketplace, not a promise of one.
Trust: the guarantees carried by the network underneath.
Identity is the through-line. It is what turns raw data into verified human data that the AI economy can actually use.
Eight years of building the foundation
Ontology comes to this moment with infrastructure already in production, not a whitepaper:
Eight years of stable operation: the Ontology MainNet has run without interruption since 30 June 2018.
An identity pioneer: ONT ID is one of the earliest decentralised identity frameworks aligned with the W3C DID standard, with 1.65 million decentralised identities issued.
Global reach: ONTO Wallet has more than 2 million users, across 70+ blockchains and 170+ countries.
A proven network: more than 20,188,999 transactions processed, 898 active nodes, and 216,135,075 ONT staked.
The infrastructure underneath: a four-part EVM upgrade
A data platform that asks people to contribute needs transactions that are fast and inexpensive. So the anniversary release also upgrades the network that makes that possible, bringing four widely adopted Ethereum opcodes to the Ontology EVM. The changes reduce transaction costs, shrink smart contract sizes, and bring the network in line with the current Ethereum standard, while removing friction for teams porting existing Ethereum contracts across.
PUSH0 (EIP-3855): places the value zero onto the stack, reducing contract size and lowering the gas cost of almost every transaction.
BASEFEE (EIP-3198): lets a contract read the network’s current base fee directly on-chain, with no external data source.
MCOPY (EIP-5656): copies memory in a single step, speeding up data-heavy operations such as encoding and cryptography.
Transient storage, TSTORE and TLOAD (EIP-1153): a low-cost storage that lasts for a single transaction, well suited to temporary state such as reentrancy protection.
Together these bring the Ontology EVM in line with the opcodes introduced in Ethereum’s Shanghai and Cancun upgrades, so the latest output from compilers such as Solidity and Vyper runs without special handling.
“For eight years we have built the infrastructure for trusted identity and user-owned data. The next eight are about putting it to work for the defining technology of our time. AI runs on data, and it increasingly needs data that is high-quality, consented, and provably human. Ontology and ONTO Wallet let people own that data and decide how it is used, turning verified human data into the foundation of a fairer AI economy.”
Li Jun, Founder of Ontology
Where Ontology goes next
This anniversary is less a celebration of what Ontology has built than a statement of where it is going. As AI resets the value of data, Ontology intends to be the place where identity is owned, data is given with consent, and verified human data becomes infrastructure the whole industry can build on.
Eight years in, the foundation is in production. The work of the next chapter starts now. Learn more at ont.io and onto.app.
