The Problem
Background
The internet’s origin story is rooted in a vision of decentralization. In 1969, the U.S.
Department of Defense launched the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), a groundbreaking effort that linked computers across locations for the first time.
This initiative planted the seeds for the modern internet, championing a dream of open, collaborative digital connectivity.
Yet, as the internet matured, telecom giants seized control, forming local monopolies that leave over 80 million Americans with just one ISP option.
This centralization has driven a 100x gap between wholesale and retail internet costs, sidelining everyday users from the bandwidth economy’s rewards.
Now, with the digital economy booming and technology advancing, there’s a renewed opportunity to reclaim that decentralized vision—and Blockmesh Network is leading the charge.
Growing need for data in AI
As AI keeps expanding at a rapid pace, access to data is reduced since the value of it increases. Recent examples include:
- Google recently signed a $60M/year deal with Reddit.
- OpenAI signed a $250M deal with WSJ.
- OpenAI signs a deal with Stack Overflow.
- AI market, and it's demand for data will grow to $1T by 2027.
The battle of quality data gets fiercer by the day.
Data Growth is Limited
Traditional data collection is incapable of handling the exponential demand for real time high quality data.
The effectiveness of AI models hinges entirely on the quality of their training data.
When the data is skewed, corrupted, or stale, the AI’s outputs mirror these shortcomings, resulting in misinformation, inefficiencies, and decisions that can’t be trusted.
Today’s AI training often relies on massive datasets, frequently pulled from the entire internet.
But as AI-generated content increasingly saturates the web, these models end up learning from low-quality, redundant, or outright false material.
To make matters worse, bots now produce 60% of social media content, warping the picture of online conversations.
AI systems fed this unfiltered mess struggle to separate genuine human exchanges from artificial noise, leading to shaky insights and predictions that fall apart under scrutiny.
As OpenAIs Co-Founder, Ilya Sutskever phrased it compute is growing, but data is not -
High Value Data is Locked in Walled Garden
The most valuable data—such as live public discussions, changing sentiments, and new trends—is often locked away in restricted platforms or tucked behind expensive API paywalls.
This limits access for businesses, independent researchers, and even up-and-coming AI models that need broad, diverse datasets to perform at their best.
BlockMesh Network offers a decentralized solution, allowing users to share their resources to gather and access high-value public social media interactions, fostering a more open and inclusive way to aggregate data.
Noteable examples to walled gardens are Reddit, Twitter and other prominent platforms have beefed up their anti data collection capabilities considerably after the AI boom.
Shortcomings of current methods
Adversarial data collection
Classical proxy based data collection faces performance, high cost and frequent IP ban by websites.
Centralized data collection
Classical data collection services lack distribution, flexibility and scale needed for large volume data collection.
Resource Owner Disempowerment
The owners of the resources used for the classical data collection are often left out, usually they are unaware their resources are being used and someone else is monetizing them and not distributing a share of the profit.