Bridge- A Web 3 Platform Empowering Consumers to Mint and Sell Their Own Data on the Blockchain

Seasoned Fintech CEO Greg Pelleteri is the creative visionary behind Bridge. Leveraging his experience as a retail banker, Greg has gone on to launch several successful start-ups, most recently Bundlefi. One day while walking through Manhattan a green light went off in Greg’s mind which fueled his passion for helping to “level the playing field” for consumers on the blockchain platform. This was the foundation at Bridge to create a disruptive business model which allows consumers to mint NFTs of their own data on the Web3 platform and get a piece of the highly lucrative data market which has been in existence for nearly two decades. Here we speak to Greg about how Bridge works, the enormous market potential, implications for a global consumer base, and the buzz behind this exciting launch in March 2023.

How did the concept for Bridge evolve to what it is today?

We have always been interested in crypto, NFT, and blockchain technology as early adopters. In the collectible art market NFTs prove authenticity. When I was walking one day, and I started thinking about NFT’s and how they can reference a person. I know everyone’s data has value and tried to figure out how to get that data referenced by an NFT and how can we get consumers compensated directly for it. This is where Bridge came into play, and we started to build the platform. Data is a $500 billion a year market and we’re able to get consumers a little piece of that for their data.

We use the Web3 blockchain that utilizes crypto and NFT. If a consumer comes to us and signs up for their NFT on Bridge with the cash application, they can input basic information about themselves, and we can mint an NFT for them. There’s a huge amount of security protocols that have been put in place as the consumers go through the journey, and they then have an NFT that will reference their data.

How does Bridge work?

What the consumer sees is super easy but on the back end it’s very complicated. We would go to consumers and inform them that we have a data buyer that is a broker, looking to buy data for a specific industry for a specific product on behalf of someone else. We investigate our database of NFT wallets and identify a group of 10,000 people fit into that demographic. We then send that information over to the data broker who has a key to open it, and they’re able to market to that consumer for say 30, 60 or 90 days depending on how the contract is written. This wasn’t possible in the Web2 world, so we needed the evolution of Web3 to really make this possible because it lets us put additional security in place. And the smart contract makes the makes the whole system work.

What is most important to the consumer is their compensation. Every consumer has a value to the market that they’re consuming. If someone wants your email address, your phone number, or home address to contact you to sell you something, there’s a value to that already which is already getting paid. The data industry has been in existence for almost 20 years, the difference is that we’re creating is a place for the consumer to get in the middle of that transaction. We don’t know anybody’s data, all I know is wallet addresses, and I’ll never know their data, nor do we even want access to it. For us to access the date, we need three different executives in the company to access it through keys, if we needed to for a legal reason. The only people that see the data is the consumer and the person they sell their data to and a monetary transaction is made between the buyer of the data and the owner. From a consumer standpoint, it’s very simple. We pay the consumer in crypto, and they’ll have a choice on how they want to do that. The important part of using the crypto is that it lets us do this anywhere on the planet and we don’t have to worry about fiat currencies. Once consumers get the crypto into their account, they can transfer it to another wallet or send it to their bank account. whatever they’d like.