- Aether Holdings and OORT have launched a joint venture to create a decentralized platform for curating high-quality, validated financial datasets.
- The partnership aims to address the lack of institutional-grade financial data that’s needed by fintech developers to create next-generation AI algorithms.
- Aether Holdings DataHub will be built on OORT’s decentralized infrastructure and incentivize Aether Holdings’s community of financial experts to collect, label, validate and enrich data that can be trusted by fintechs.
Aether Holdings, a company that’s best known for its fintech media publishing efforts, is teaming up with the decentralized data cloud company OORT. They’re building a new, community-focused platform that will decentralize and incentivize the creation of high-quality financial datasets for AI developers.
The two companies said today they’ve agreed to establish a joint venture called Aether DataHub, which will use OORT’s technology base to address an acute shortage of verified data that can be used by financial institutions to train AI systems.
The financial services industry is ripe for AI automation, but progress there has been slower than in many other industries due to the acute shortage of suitable data. Aether Holdings says that domain-specific data is sorely needed to build specialized AI models that can automate tasks such as trading, investing, or researching new investments, but it’s proving hard to come by. While no one disputes that there is plenty of financial data available online, the problem is that most of it is unverified, and therefore cannot be trusted by financial organizations that must adhere to strict regulations.
Aether Holdings’s solution to this conundrum is simple. It’s going to use OORT’s existing decentralized data infrastructure and encourage its 400,000-strong global community of subscribers, many of whom are financial wizards, to create this data. Aether Holdings DataHub will rely on OORT’s platform to manage the full lifecycle of financial data. OORT’s platform is notably incentivized, with each contributor earning crypto rewards for the work they do, whether that’s gathering the data, labeling it, performing validation or enriching it with additional data. The validation step is especially critical, because this is necessary to ensure that any dataset that reaches Aether Holdings DataHub’s marketplace will meet the highest institutional standards.
The ultimate goal of Aether Holdings DataHub is to build a proprietary data layer that will support both its own internal AI roadmap, and also provide access to other enterprises that need specialized datasets to train their own AI systems. It will be a place where organizations can search for or request specialized, human-validated datasets that cannot be found anywhere else.
OORT founder and CEO Max Li said the project is a fantastic showcase of how decentralized infrastructure can help to gather and utilize community-based financial intelligence. “We are mobilizing participants to create a living, evolving financial data layer that can become the backbone of the global financial market’s data value chain,” he said.
Aether Holdings will handle Aether Holdings DataHub’s commercialization and market development, while OORT will be left alone to focus on building the platform itself. Aether Holdings holds majority governance rights, which gives it control over the venture’s future strategy.
Aether Holdings CEO Nicolas Lin said the next generation of intelligent financial applications can only be as good as the data that powers them, which is why it’s necessary to focus on supplying that resource. “Aether Holdings DataHub positions us to own and operate a critical layer of financial AI infrastructure and participate directly in the financial AI data ecosystem while building a proprietary data asset base that compounds in value over time,” he explained. “This is a long-term, strategically controlled investment designed to define our role in the financial AI ecosystem.”
