Data is often called the "new oil," but unlike oil, it is difficult to sell without losing control of it. Once you send a dataset to a buyer, you cannot un-send it. You rely on their security hygiene and legal compliance. For highly sensitive data—patient records, banking transaction logs, proprietary manufacturing processes—the risk of selling often outweighs the reward.
The Liquidity Crisis of Data
Because of these risks, the world's most valuable data remains locked in silos. Researchers starve for high-quality medical data while hospitals sit on petabytes of it, unable to share it due to HIPAA and privacy concerns. This creates a massive deadweight loss in the global economy and slows scientific progress.
The Zektra Marketplace
Zektra solves this liquidity crisis by decoupling access from utility. Through our encrypted compute layer, data owners can list their datasets on the Zektra marketplace without ever exposing the raw data.
Here is the workflow:
- Encryption: The data owner encrypts the dataset locally with their private key.
- Listing: They list the encrypted dataset on Zektra, specifying a price per training epoch.
- Training: An AI developer pays the fee. The encrypted data is sent to compute nodes.
- Result: The model is trained homomorphically. The developer receives the trained weights; the nodes see nothing; the owner keeps the raw data private.
A New Economic Era
This mechanism turns privacy from a liability into an asset. Institutions can now create new revenue streams from their data moats without compromising their competitive advantage or regulatory standing. We are witnessing the birth of a new asset class: Private, Yield-Bearing Data.