Ontology at Eight: Building the Verified Human Data Layer for the AI Economy
Singapore, Singapore, July 2nd, 2026, Chainwire
On its eighth anniversary, Ontology puts ONTO Wallet at the centre of its strategy, adding an identity and verified human data platform to its multi-chain wallet, with a four-part Ontology EVM upgrade keeping the infrastructure underneath fast and current.
Ontology, the Layer 1 blockchain for decentralised identity and data, marked the eighth anniversary of its MainNet by setting out the next chapter of its strategy: building the trusted identity and verified human data layer for the AI economy. At the centre is ONTO Wallet, the ecosystem’s datawallet, which is adding an identity and data platform that lets people own the data they create and put it to work, exactly as AI’s demand for high-quality, consent-based human data accelerates.
Eight years of building identity and data infrastructure have prepared Ontology for an AI economy that increasingly depends on trusted, consent-based human data.
The data problem AI is about to hit
AI has a data problem. As models become more capable, the supply of high-quality, consent-based human data is becoming one of the industry’s biggest constraints. Synthetic data can scale human judgement, but it cannot replace it. What AI increasingly needs is verified human data: information that is high-quality, consent-based, and provably created by a real person, sourced in a way enterprises can stand behind.
The supply of that data is the problem. Today the people who create data rarely share in its value. By Ontology’s own analysis, Meta, Alphabet and Amazon alone have earned more than 1.3 trillion US dollars from user-generated data, while the individuals behind it receive nothing. Regulation is moving the other way: frameworks such as the EU Data Act are pushing enterprises toward first-party, user-consented data. The missing piece has been a way to prove data is authentic and human without exposing it. That is the gap Ontology has spent eight years preparing to fill.
ONTO Wallet: from holding assets to owning data
ONTO Wallet is the centre of the strategy. It remains a multi-chain Web3 wallet, and is now building on that foundation to add an identity and verified human data platform. People own the data they create, build a verified profile, and earn rewards by contributing data on their own terms. On the other side of the marketplace, projects in AI, gaming and Web3 gain access to verified human data, a resource that is in growing demand and hard to source responsibly.
The platform rests on capabilities Ontology has built over its eight years, now native to the wallet: decentralised identity through ONT ID, and software-only verification that confirms data is authentic and human without exposing the underlying information. No special hardware is required.
It is organised around four ideas: ownership of personal data, verifiable identity as the core differentiator, real utility through rewards and a working data marketplace, and trust carried by the network underneath. Identity is the through-line: it is what lets a person prove who they are and what they have done, and what turns raw data into verified human data that the AI economy can use.
Eight years of building the foundation
Ontology comes to this moment with infrastructure already in production, not a whitepaper:
- Eight years of stable operation: the Ontology MainNet has run without interruption since 30 June 2018.
- An identity pioneer: ONT ID is one of the earliest decentralised identity frameworks aligned with the W3C DID standard, with 1.65 million decentralised identities issued.
- Global reach through ONTO Wallet: more than 2 million users, across 70+ blockchains and 170+ countries.
- A proven network: more than 20 million transactions processed, ~900 active nodes, and 216 million ONT staked
The infrastructure underneath: a four-part EVM upgrade
A data platform that asks people to contribute often needs transactions that are fast and inexpensive. The anniversary release upgrades the network that makes that possible, bringing four widely adopted Ethereum opcodes to the Ontology EVM. The changes reduce transaction costs, shrink smart contract sizes, and bring the network in line with the current Ethereum standard, while removing friction for teams porting existing Ethereum contracts across.
- PUSH0 (EIP-3855): places the value zero onto the stack, reducing contract size and lowering the gas cost of almost every transaction.
- BASEFEE (EIP-3198): lets a contract read the network’s current base fee directly on-chain, with no external data source.
- MCOPY (EIP-5656): copies memory in a single step, speeding up data-heavy operations such as encoding and cryptography.
- Transient storage, TSTORE and TLOAD (EIP-1153): a low-cost storage that lasts for a single transaction, well suited to temporary state such as reentrancy protection.
Together these bring the Ontology EVM in line with the opcodes introduced in Ethereum’s Shanghai and Cancun upgrades, so the latest output from compilers such as Solidity and Vyper runs without special handling. Alongside the EVM enhancements, Ontology has continued its ongoing technical review process, introducing a series of performance optimisations and bug fixes that further improve network stability, efficiency and overall reliability.
“For eight years we have built the infrastructure for trusted identity and user-owned data. The next eight are about putting it to work for the defining technology of our time,” said Li Jun, Founder of Ontology. “AI runs on data, and it increasingly needs data that is high-quality, consented, and provably human. Ontology and ONTO Wallet let people own that data and decide how it is used, turning verified human data into the foundation of a fairer AI economy.”
Where Ontology goes next
This anniversary is less a celebration of what Ontology has built than a statement of where it is going. As AI resets the value of data, Ontology intends to be the place where identity is owned, data is given with consent, and verified human data becomes infrastructure the whole industry can build on. The work of the next chapter starts now.
About Ontology
Ontology is building the trusted identity and verified human data layer for the AI economy. Through decentralised identity and verifiable data, Ontology gives individuals control over their information and enables enterprises to access verified, user-consented data at scale. For more information, visit ont.io.
About ONTO Wallet
ONTO Wallet is evolving from a multi-chain wallet into a multi-chain data wallet for the AI economy. It lets people own their digital identity, build a verified profile from the data they already create, and earn rewards by contributing that data on their own terms, while giving projects access to verified human data. Learn more at onto.app.