Meet AI Soulforge, a 14 day campaign to mint your first AI profile inside ONTO Wallet, share it with the world, and split an $800 ONG prize pool with the community.

What is an AI Profile?

An AI Profile is the visual and data signature of you, generated from a multi dimensional profile you build inside ONTO Wallet. Personal details, languages, education, career, and skills come together into a single, user authorised record. ONTO then turns that record into a customised AI avatar you actually own.

It is the first visible step in ONTO’s transition into a data wallet. The avatar is the fun part. The profile underneath is the asset: structured, permissioned, and ready to power the data economy we described yesterday.

How to Forge Your Soul

Four steps, all inside the ONTO app:

1. Enrich your profile. Open ONTO, head to the Profile tab, and tap Generate Your AI Profile. Fill in Personal Information, Language & Education, and Career & Skills through the Complete Your Profile tab.

2. Generate your avatar. Confirm your details and sign the message. ONTO builds your customised AI avatar on the spot.

3. Go premium (optional). Every device gets one free image avatar every 24 hours. For extra image avatars or a video avatar, pay a small fee and enter the Premium prize pool.
4. Share on X. Post your avatar template with #MyONTOSoul, then drop your post link under the official campaign tweet to enter the Social Amplifier raffle.

The Prize Pool: $800 in ONG

Two pools, one goal: reward the users who commit.

Premium Prize, $500 100 winners, $5 each, drawn at random from everyone who paid to generate an avatar during the campaign.

Social Amplifier Raffle, $300 100 winners, $3 each, drawn from users who generated an image or video avatar and shared it on X with #MyONTOSoul plus their post link and wallet address under the campaign tweet.

Each Device ID can only win once, and you can only win once across both pools.

You Own the Output

Everything you generate belongs to you. The profile data stays user authorised, the avatar is yours to post wherever you like, and any future data monetisation flows back to the wallet that owns it. That is the whole point of a data wallet: your data, your permission, your upside.

Get Started

The campaign is live now and runs for 14 days. Don’t have ONTO yet?

Download ONTO Wallet

Open the app, tap Profile, tap Generate Your AI Profile, and forge your soul. Share it with #MyONTOSoul and come find us under the campaign tweet.

Your data has always had worth. Now it has a face.

Why ONTO Is Making This Shift

The ONTO data wallet is here, and it changes how you relate to your own information. Every app you use collects data about you. Your preferences, your behaviour, your identity. That data gets packaged, sold, and used to train AI models, target ads, and build products. The value flows in one direction: away from you.

The AI training data market alone is projected to grow from $7.48 billion in 2025 to $52.41 billion by 2035. That growth is built on human data. The question is whether the humans producing that data should have a say in how it is used, and whether they should benefit from it.

ONTO was built on Ontology’s decentralised identity infrastructure: ONT ID for verifiable credentials, and Orange Protocol for reputation scoring and cross-chain data aggregation. Those capabilities already give users portable, self-sovereign identity across Web3. The next step is to make that identity productive: to let users contribute their data, verify it, and earn from it on their own terms.

That is the shift. The ONTO data wallet evolves Ontology’s existing identity tools into a platform that puts your data to work.

How It Works: Use, Earn, Control

ONTO’s data ownership model follows three stages. Each one builds on the last, and together they create something that has not existed in Web3 before: a user-controlled data economy.

Stage 1: Use

You submit your data to access real services that benefit you directly. The first example is AI Avatars: upload your profile information and ONTO generates a personalised AI avatar using your own data. It is not a gimmick. It is the first practical demonstration that your data has value, and that you are the one who should benefit from contributing it.

This is a deliberate inversion of the current model. Instead of platforms quietly harvesting your data in the background, you choose to contribute it, and you receive something tangible in return.

Stage 2: Earn

Once you have verified your data, it becomes more than just information sitting in a profile. It becomes something meaningful, something the ecosystem recognises as yours and rewards you for contributing. Instead of having your information silently extracted, you receive corresponding incentives for the data you choose to share.

Stage 3: Control

This is where the model reaches its full potential. Users decide which third parties can access their data, for what purpose, and under what conditions. Authorisation is granular and revocable. You might allow a gaming studio to see your play history but keep your financial data private. You might sell anonymised behavioural data to an AI training company while retaining full control over your identity credentials.

The key principle: your data, your terms, your revenue. ONTO facilitates the connection between users and data buyers, but the user always holds the keys.

The Product Vision

The vision behind the ONTO data wallet is straightforward. Today, platforms use data. Tomorrow, users should decide how data is used. The whole model shifts from passive participation to active ownership, where individuals shape where their data goes and how it gets applied.

This reframes data as something owned by users rather than something exploited by platforms. It introduces user participation into a technological equation that has, until now, largely left them out. AI Avatars are the first proof of that principle. The rest of the roadmap builds on the same foundation.

What Is in the New Release

The new ONTO update (v4.9.23) is the first release built around this vision. Here is what it includes:

AI Avatar Creation. Submit your profile data and generate a personalised AI avatar. This is the Use stage in action: your data powers a service that benefits you directly. Avatars can be static images or animated, with animated versions available via ONT or ONG payment.

Enhanced AI Profile. Your ONTO profile now functions as a structured data profile. Personal details, preferences, and activity data are organised in a way that makes them valuable and verifiable. This is the foundation for the Earn and Control stages that follow.

Data Contribution Framework. The underlying architecture for submitting, verifying, and managing your data is now in place. This release focuses on the user experience of contributing data and receiving immediate value. Future updates will expand the types of data you can contribute and introduce the full reward and authorisation systems.

How to Get Started

Once the new version is live on iOS and Android:

1. Update ONTO to the latest version from the App Store or Google Play.

2. Open your AI Profile and complete your profile information. The more data you contribute, the richer your avatar and the stronger your profile for future earning opportunities.

3. Generate your AI Avatar using the new creation tool. You can save it, regenerate it, or upgrade to an animated version.

4. Stay tuned for the next updates, which will introduce data verification, ONG rewards, and the ability to authorise data access to third parties.

What Comes Next

AI Avatars are the starting point, not the destination. Here is what is on the roadmap:

Data verification and rewards. The next step is verifying the data you submit and rewarding users for contributing verified information. This is where the Earn stage comes to life.

Third-party data authorisation. After that, the Control stage: choose which third parties can access your data, set your own terms, and revoke access whenever you want.

Campaigns and activities. Alongside each release, we will run campaigns and community activities designed to give early users additional ways to engage with the new features.

The vision is clear: a world where your data works for you, not against you. ONTO is building the tools to make that real, one feature at a time.

Download ONTO and build your profile today. The future of your data starts with you.

Download ONTO Wallet  |  Learn more about Ontology

The Indie Takeover

Web3 gaming has been through a brutal reset. In 2025, over 90% of gaming token launches failed to hold their initial value, studio closures accelerated, and the venture capital that once flooded the space dried up. The era of raising $50 million for a blockchain game that might ship in three years is over.

But something interesting happened on the way down. While the big-budget projects struggled, a new wave of indie Web3 studios kept building. Smaller teams, leaner budgets, gameplay-first design. According to industry analysis from GAM3S.GG, indie titles are expected to account for roughly 70% of active Web3 players in 2026, up from a fraction of that two years ago. The $500K game is beating the $50 million game, and the market is starting to reflect it.

This is not just a Web3 story. It mirrors a broader trend across gaming: smaller studios with focused mechanics and dedicated communities consistently outperform bloated productions. But in Web3, this shift exposes a critical problem that traditional gaming solved decades ago.

The problem is data.

The Data Gap: Flying Blind

When EA launches a new title, it plugs into a mature analytics stack built over years: player segmentation, churn prediction, lifetime value modelling, behavioural cohort analysis. These tools let studios understand who their players are, what keeps them engaged, and where the monetisation opportunities sit.

Indie Web3 studios have none of this. Most can see wallet addresses. They can track on-chain transactions. But that tells them almost nothing about the humans behind those wallets. Is this player a competitive grinder or a casual explorer? Are they a whale who will spend on cosmetics, or a free-to-play loyalist who adds value through community participation? Are they about to churn, or are they deepening their engagement?

Without player segmentation, indie studios cannot personalise experiences, cannot target retention efforts, and cannot build the sustainable economies that the post-token-crash market demands. They are flying blind in a market that has already punished guesswork.

The Web3 gaming market is projected at $48.55 billion in 2026, growing at 22.4% CAGR. But the studios that capture value from this growth will not be those with the flashiest tokens. They will be those that understand their players.

The Player Side: Fragmented and Invisible

Flip to the other side of the equation. A typical Web3 gamer in 2026 plays three to five titles. They have wallets on multiple chains. They participate in Discord communities, follow creators, and generate behavioural signals across every game they touch: session length, genre preferences, spending patterns, social connections, skill progression.

None of this data is connected. Each game is a silo. Each platform captures its own slice. The player has no unified profile, no portable reputation, and no way to carry their gaming identity from one title to the next. Every new game starts from zero.

This is a Web2 problem that Web3 was supposed to solve. Wallets gave players ownership of assets, but they did not give players ownership of their identity or their data. A wallet address proves you hold a token. It says nothing about who you are as a player.

The result is a lose-lose: studios cannot see their players, and players cannot leverage their own history.

Beyond the Chain: Why Off-Chain Data Changes Everything

Most Web3 analytics tools focus exclusively on on-chain activity: token transfers, smart contract interactions, NFT ownership. This data is useful but shallow. It captures transactions, not behaviour.

The richest player data is off-chain. It includes play session duration, in-game decision patterns, social engagement, community contributions, content creation, platform preferences, and spending habits in traditional gaming. This is the data that powers player segmentation in traditional gaming, and it is almost entirely absent from Web3.

This is where decentralised identity (DID) wallets become relevant, and where the conversation shifts from analytics tools to identity infrastructure.

A DID wallet is not just a place to store tokens. It is a portable, verified identity container. It can aggregate both on-chain and off-chain activity into a single profile: gaming history, credentials, reputation scores, behavioural patterns. Critically, this profile is controlled by the player, not the platform.

ONTO Wallet, built on Ontology’s decentralised identity infrastructure, is an example of a DID wallet designed for exactly this kind of aggregation. Its identity framework can bring together on-chain transactions, off-chain activity, and verifiable credentials into a unified profile. The player decides what to include, what to share, and what to keep private.

For gaming, this means a player’s identity can carry context that no single game could build alone: verified play history, cross-title reputation, social proof, spending patterns across platforms. Not just what you bought, but how you play.

What Player Segmentation Looks Like with Portable Identity

Imagine an indie studio preparing to launch a competitive tournament. In today’s Web3 landscape, they would promote it broadly and hope the right players show up. With portable DID profiles, the picture changes.

Players who have built verified gaming profiles, including credentials from past tournaments, reputation scores from sustained engagement, and behavioural data indicating competitive play style, become visible as a segment. Not because a platform tracked them, but because they chose to build and share that profile.

The studio does not need to build analytics infrastructure from scratch. The identity layer already holds the player intelligence, structured and verified, with the player’s consent at every step.

This model works for any segment. Casual mobile players. High-spending collectors. Community builders. Content creators. Each segment emerges from the data players contribute to their own profiles, not from surveillance, but from participation.

For players, the incentive is straightforward. A strong gaming profile unlocks access: early invites, exclusive content, recognition within communities. The more you contribute to your identity, the more valuable that identity becomes. Not just to you, but to the ecosystem around you.

The Opportunity Ahead

The Web3 gaming market is maturing. The industry reset of 2025 cleared out speculative projects and forced a reckoning with what actually sustains a game: engaged, understood, and valued players. The shift from play-to-earn to play-and-own reflects this new reality.

But ownership without identity is incomplete. Owning an in-game asset is meaningful only if your identity, your reputation, and your data travel with you. This is the layer that Web3 gaming is still building.

DID wallets are the infrastructure that closes this gap. By giving players a portable, verified identity that aggregates both on-chain and off-chain data, they solve the data problem for studios and the fragmentation problem for players at the same time.

Ontology’s identity infrastructure, and ONTO Wallet as its user-facing product, is positioned squarely in this space. With decentralised identity, verifiable credentials, and reputation scoring already built into the wallet, the foundation for a portable gaming identity is not theoretical. It is available today.

The question is not whether player data will become central to Web3 gaming. The market has already answered that. The question is who controls it: platforms that extract it silently, or players who own it and choose how it is used.

Build your profile. Own your identity. The data is yours.

Start building your identity profile with ONTO Wallet. Learn more about Ontology’s decentralised identity infrastructure at ont.io.

Right now, your data flows through platforms that dictate the rules. They own the relationship. They own your data. You own nothing. But data sovereignty changes that equation. It’s not hypothetical. It’s not coming. It’s here. And once you understand these three powers, you’ll understand why platforms built on extraction are so desperate to keep you from claiming them. This isn’t philosophy. It’s practical power. It’s yours to claim.

Power 1: Control

Right now, you click “agree” to terms of service you’ll never read, and then a company owns a copy of your data forever. Revoke? Not really. Delete? Maybe, if you ask nicely and wait three months. Granular control over what specific data goes where? Forget it. You get an all-or-nothing choice: accept their entire data collection apparatus or don’t use the service.

With data sovereignty, you control at the source. Not the platform. Not regulators. You. You decide who sees what. You grant access to your location data, but only on Tuesdays. You grant access to your browsing history for one specific marketing campaign, then revoke it. You share your health data with a researcher, but for a limited time window. You decide. The data stays yours. Someone wants your browsing history? You say yes or no. Someone wants your health data? Same thing. This isn’t permission that expires. This is permission you control, actively, all the time.

This is what GDPR calls the “right to access” and the “right to erasure”. GDPR gives you the legal right to these powers. But GDPR requires regulatory enforcement. Someone has to complain. Someone has to investigate. Someone has to sue. With data sovereignty and decentralised identity, you don’t need regulators. You enforce it yourself. The data lives with you, not with them. Companies access it only when you explicitly say so. No hidden agreements. No terms buried in small print. Just you, in control.

No locked-in silos. No data hostages locked in corporate vaults. No switching costs because you lose all your history. Just pure control.

Power 2: Transparency

Tech companies love opacity. They love that you can’t see their algorithms. You don’t know how they classified you. They might have labeled you as “high-income” or “vulnerable to scams” or “politically radical”. You don’t know which of your data points triggered which decision. You’re a ghost in their machine. An input. A data point. A variable in their profit equation.

With data sovereignty and decentralised identity, the fog clears. You see every access. Who accessed your data? When did they access it? What did they do with it? Why did they access it? Full audit trail. Not a “privacy policy” hidden behind terms of service. Not a “we might be using this for this”. An actual log. Timestamps. Purpose codes. Proof. You know exactly what’s happening to your information at every moment.

This kills the algorithmic black box. The W3C DID specification creates the framework for this kind of verifiable, auditable interaction. Every data access is cryptographically signed. Tamper-proof. You don’t need to trust the platform. You can verify what they did, when they did it, and why. You can audit your own data in real time.

No hidden algorithms. No invisible operations. No guessing. Just truth.

Power 3: Monetisation

Your data is worth billions. Not to you. To them. Google, Meta, TikTok, Amazon, Microsoft. They extract it. They refine it. They package it. They sell it. They build empires on it. You get “free” email. You get “free” social media. You get “free” cloud storage. That’s the bargain: your data for their services. Except it’s not a bargain. It’s a trap.

Here’s what you didn’t know: that deal is optional now. With data sovereignty, when someone uses your data, you get paid. Not through a “free” service with hidden ads. Directly. A company wants to train an AI model on your data? Pay you. A marketer wants access to your preferences and browsing history? Pay you. A researcher wants your anonymised health data? Pay you. The relationship flips. You’re not the product. You’re the vendor. You’re the data provider. You control the transaction.

Look at where Big Tech’s revenue actually comes from. Meta reported 98% of revenue from advertising in 2024. Google? 80% from advertising. That advertising revenue is built entirely on your data. Your behaviour. Your interests. Your location. Your attention. Your secrets. Right now, you see none of it. A platform makes $10,000 from your data and gives you back a $5 service. That’s not a bargain. That’s extraction.

With direct monetisation through data sovereignty, the power shifts. You decide the price. You decide the buyer. You decide the duration. You decide the use case. You decide the terms. No platform middleman. No extraction. Your data, your rules, your earnings.

Why Big Tech Doesn’t Want You to Have These Powers

These three powers don’t just inconvenience Big Tech. They destroy its moat. They tear down the walls that protect its monopoly.

The entire business model of modern tech platforms rests on your powerlessness. Control? They own it. You own nothing. Transparency? They hide it. You can’t see their algorithms. You can’t audit your data. You can’t prove what they did with it. Monetisation? They keep it. All of it. This asymmetry is the foundation of their profit. If you have control, they can’t exploit you. If you have transparency, you can’t be manipulated. If you have monetisation, the “free” extraction model collapses.

This is why they fight data sovereignty. This is why they lobby against regulation that gives you rights. This is why they bury privacy settings three layers deep. Not because it’s hard to implement. Because they don’t want you to have it. They don’t want you to have control. They don’t want you to see what they’re doing. They don’t want you to get paid.

Decentralised identity makes all three powers possible. And that terrifies them. Because once you can control your data, see what’s happening to it in real time, and get paid for it, the extraction model becomes unsustainable. They can’t compete on lock-in anymore. They can’t compete on information asymmetry. They can’t compete on free services subsidised by your unpaid labour. They’ll have to compete on actual value. On actual service. On actual innovation. Not on lock-in. Not on surveillance. Not on extraction.

They’re not afraid of the technology. They’re afraid of you having power.

The Shift Is Happening

These aren’t theoretical powers. They’re not some utopian future. The infrastructure exists right now. Decentralised identity standards are implemented. Zero-knowledge proofs are live. Blockchain-based data marketplaces are operating. Open identity protocols are scaling. The tools are here. The technology is proven.

The only question left is whether you claim them. Whether you demand data sovereignty. Whether you opt out of the extraction economy and opt into the ownership economy.

If you’ve been following this series, you already know that the current data economy is broken. You already understand that your data is making billions and you see none of it. You understand that this is by design, not accident. That the extraction model is intentional. That the companies benefiting from it will fight to preserve it. Now you know the specific powers you have to change it. Control. Transparency. Monetisation. Not wishes. Not hopes. Real, actionable, implementable powers. Powers you can exercise right now.

Data sovereignty isn’t about building the perfect alternative system. It’s about giving you the freedom to own the system you choose to use. To decide the terms. To control the flow. To capture the value. Your data, your rules, your earnings.

Follow ONTO Wallet to learn what these powers look like in practice.

It doesn’t have to be.

The Value You Create Every Single Day

Right now, every moment you spend online generates data. Your morning scroll through social media, every search query, how long you pause on certain content, your fitness data, your gaming history, what you buy and when you buy it. This data has tremendous value. Companies spend billions annually to acquire it, analyse it, and use it to shape what you see, what you want, and what you buy.

You’ve never seen a pound of that value.

The platforms you use extract this data for free. They’ve built entire business models around it. Your engagement funds their infrastructure. Your behaviour patterns train their algorithms. Your personal details become their inventory. And the benefit flows in one direction: outward, away from you.

What Data Ownership Actually Looks Like

Data ownership isn’t some abstract concept. It has specific, tangible implications.

First, control. You decide who sees what. If a company wants access to your data, you grant it. If you want to revoke it, you do. Under frameworks like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), you already have the legal right to access and delete your data. But legal rights and practical control are not the same thing. Your information shouldn’t be locked into a silo controlled by a platform; it should be genuinely yours to manage.

Second, transparency. You see who accesses your data, when, and why. No hidden algorithms deciding what happens to your information in the dark. You can audit the relationships, understand the purpose, and make informed decisions.

Third, compensation. When someone uses your data, you get paid. Not indirectly. Not in the form of a “free service.” Directly. A company needs your anonymised behavioural data to improve their product; they pay you for it. Your data works for you.

Your Digital Identity Is Scattered. It Doesn’t Have to Be.

Here’s another reality that most people don’t pause to consider: your identity is fragmented across dozens of platforms. Your login credentials live on this service. Your reputation, built painstakingly over years, is locked into that one. Your purchase history, your review history, your social connections, your professional credentials; all scattered.

None of which you actually control. Each platform owns a slice of who you are.

Imagine consolidating that. Your credentials, your reputation, your history, your preferences; all in one place that belongs to you. Portable. Verifiable. Able to move with you across the web without needing permission from any single gatekeeper. You become the authoritative source of your own identity. Services can verify that you’re trustworthy without needing to lock you in.

The Infrastructure Already Exists

This isn’t science fiction. The technological foundations are already being built. Decentralised identity standards mean your credentials can exist independently of any platform. Reputation systems can prove you’re credible without revealing your personal details. Trust layers allow this to function at scale, securely and efficiently.

What we’re seeing now is the shift from infrastructure to adoption. From technical possibility to user experience. From “this could work” to “this is how people actually own their digital lives.” Meanwhile, the cost of data breaches continues to climb, reinforcing why the current model of centralised data storage is unsustainable.

From Product to Owner

The shift from “you are the product” to “you are the owner” isn’t a small one. It rewires the relationship between you and the services you use.

Your data doesn’t get extracted anymore. It works for you. Your identity doesn’t get scattered across platforms. It belongs to you. Your reputation isn’t held hostage by an algorithm. It follows you.

This isn’t about rejecting the digital world. It’s about changing who’s in control of it.

The question isn’t whether data ownership becomes the norm. It’s whether you’re early or late.

Follow ONTO Wallet to see what data ownership looks like.

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