I have had a bunch of these ideas kicking around in my head for years, and I’m going to start giving them out to entrepreneurs so we can get this party started in the Teranode era. If you turn my idea into a thriving company, please credit me and/or throw me a bone!
Now, for the content!
Energy was the resource driver that defined the last century. Whale fat, crude oil, coal, nuclear… Control of energy created puppet masters the likes of which had never been seen until data emerged as the key commodity of the 21st century.
I have long stated that “data is money,” but much like the gulf of difference between a whale-fat lamp’s disparity relative to uranium rods in a nuclear power plant, there is a hierarchy in the value of different types of data. In my opinion, genetic data will be a major defining cornerstone of this emerging era.
Why?
Hidden within every strand of DNA is code that could add decades to our lives or end them prematurely. That code can reveal predispositions to disease, show whether a drug will help or harm, and point scientists toward cures we once thought impossible. But DNA isn’t just a treasure trove for medicine. It is also a dossier of vulnerabilities. Employers could discriminate. Insurers could deny coverage. Criminals or governments could weaponize genetic traits against particular groups. Once your genome escapes your control, you can’t take it back or change it. This tension, between unprecedented benefit and existential risk, makes the question of who owns and safeguards our genetic information one of the most urgent discussions of our time.
And yet, it is not often discussed.
Nowhere is that tension clearer than in the collapse of 23andMe. In the spring of 2025, a federal bankruptcy court approved the sale of the direct-to-consumer genetic testing company to a research institute founded by its own co‑founder. The sale includes the company’s personal genome service, research services, and telehealth business. That transaction has triggered alarm among privacy advocates and prosecutors.
A coalition of U.S. states and the District of Columbia sued to block the transfer unless customers explicitly consented. Attorney generals urged customers to demand the deletion of their DNA profiles and the destruction of biological samples. Only about 2 million of 23andMe’s 15 million customers did so. The concern is simple: once control of genetic data passes to new owners, consumers have little recourse to prevent misuse.
And so, for the first time, a company going bankrupt isn’t just a business story, but a warning about the fragility of privacy in the genomic age.
The 23andMe saga exemplifies how poorly the current market treats private information in general, and genetic information in particular. Most commercial DNA testing firms use a model that is as simple as it is troubling: they entice customers with ancestry trivia or health tidbits, then sell those genetic profiles to pharmaceutical companies, data brokers, and sometimes law enforcement. Customers get a report and maybe a few health recommendations; the companies make recurring profits by reselling the data. The tests are cheap because they sequence only a tiny fraction of the genome; about one‑tenth of 1%. That’s enough to map genealogy, but worthless for precision medicine, because whole genome sequencing is still expensive, insurance often refuses to pay for it, and privacy regulations rightly make it difficult to collect samples.
As a result, scientists lack the diverse, high‑resolution genetic datasets necessary to develop cures and therapies, and companies like 23AndMe are running off with the raw data…
What if we decided to flip this model?
I propose a platform where individuals control their entire genome and profit from it. Instead of getting a half‑hearted spit test, every participant receives whole genome sequencing in a lab using the same method that scientific researchers use. The data is then encrypted, split into individual variants, and stored on a public ledger using techniques native to privacy‑focused blockchain protocols. Each genomic marker becomes a discrete digital token, and then those tokens live in a wallet controlled by the individual.
Imagine those tokens being leased or sold to researchers on a per‑query basis while maintaining the privacy of the owner.
When a pharmaceutical company needs to study a gene associated with Alzheimer’s, it buys access directly from the owners of that gene variant. Middlemen vanish. The price is set by the seller, not by a corporation harvesting data in secret. Individuals who can’t afford sequencing can lease tokens from others via smart contracts to pay for their test, repaying the lender with a share of future sales.
This model aims at a few key problems.
First, it recognizes that genetic data is valuable and that value should return to the people it comes from.
Second, it acknowledges that privacy is non‑negotiable. The system uses cryptographic proofs to anonymize the data so that no one looking at the blockchain can link a set of variants to a particular person.
Third, it introduces self-sovereign governance of the data. Decisions about how the individual (and their data) operates within the platform are made by the consenting owner of the data rather than a handful of executives. In practice, this means users can audit that smart contracts enforce accountability, and all actions are transparent.
Finally, it solves the sequencing cost problem by using the token system itself to underwrite testing, financializing the data with the use of a scalable, liquid token tied to a real-world asset (commonly called “RWA,”) and by taking advantage of rapid declines in sequencing prices over time as more people create economies of scale by seeking profit from a completely unique, non-fungible asset: the billions of lines of code written to their deepest fabric.
Beyond individual benefits, the potential societal impact is enormous. For medicine, a global repository of high‑quality whole genomes would accelerate science immensely. Researchers would be able to search for specific genotypes tied to cancer or rare diseases and pay the owners for that data, potentially offering them life-saving treatment in exchange for their data.
Done correctly, treatment could become completely individualized, improving outcomes and reducing side effects. For public health, such a system might help track the spread of pathogens or identify genetic markers that confer resistance to a virus, leading to far more effective vaccines.
Because users control access, they could also decide to make their data available to humanitarian projects, such as ending poaching. In some African countries, conservation groups are already using DNA to link ivory to specific elephants. A low‑cost sequencing and data marketplace could make it affordable to test every tusk, rhino horn, or piece of Gorilla fur to make illegal trade so hard that it becomes unprofitable.
The same principle could apply to tracing missing children, or to giving impoverished families a revenue stream by selling rare genomes of geographically isolated people with long-unmixed genetics to researchers in order to learn about the deep history of the human species, or benefit from genetic variants in one population that could resist rampant diseases in other parts of the world!
Global adoption, however, depends on a blockchain that can handle the scale of genetic data.
Sequencing one human genome produces around 100 gigabytes of raw information. When that data is tokenized and broken into millions of variants, each variant becomes its own transaction. A genetic marketplace would involve billions, possibly trillions, of token transfers and micropayments over its lifetime. Popular blockchains process a handful of transactions per second (TPS) and charge dollars for each. Even some so‑called “next‑generation” networks that tout thousands of TPS would choke on genomic data, and their reliance on account‑based architectures or sharded rollups introduces points of failure, security concerns, and unnecessary complexity.
BSV, by contrast, was designed for unbounded scale.
Its base protocol remains faithful to Satoshi’s original architecture: a simple unspent transaction output (UTXO) model, a fixed ruleset, and blocks that grow with demand. Fees are measured in fractions of a cent. The network can already process millions of transactions per block and is pushing toward billions with its Teranode implementation. For a genomic marketplace, that scale is not just advantageous, but necessary. Without it, we would be forced to fragment data into side chains or off‑chain databases, reintroducing the very intermediaries we hope to eliminate.
BSV’s capacity means you can store and transfer genetic tokens directly on chain, query them via overlay services, and settle payments instantly. Combined with standards like the 1Sat Ordinal protocol and schemas defined at BitcoinSchema.org, the infrastructure for tokenized genetic data is already here!
The 23andMe bankruptcy shows what happens when data custodianship is entrusted to Silicon Valley venture‑funded firms that prioritize short‑term revenue over user sovereignty. In that case, fifteen million people’s genomes may end up in the hands of a new owner. Lawyers and regulators can fight over consent and privacy clauses, but the horse has bolted. Once a genetic database exists inside a corporation, it is subject to merger, acquisition, or liquidation. Even if legal agreements promise not to sell data without consent, enforcement is ambiguous and after‑the‑fact. And there is no guarantee that smaller companies in developing countries will adhere, even nominally, to privacy standards.
The urgency of building such systems cannot be overstated, especially in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) where large sets of data are becoming increasingly easy to ingest, sort, use, and reuse.
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The solution is both technical and philosophical. Technically, we need a scalable blockchain that can support the throughput, and privacy demands of genetic tokenization. That points inexorably to BSV.
Philosophically, we need to shift from a culture where data is extracted and owned by corporations to one where individuals treat their information as an asset they control. In this vision, governments regulate but do not confiscate, scientists access data by paying for it directly, and people in every country can leverage their genomes to improve their lives. Privacy isn’t a side benefit; it is the bedrock that makes participation safe.
The promise of extending human life and eradicating disease will be realized, but only if we construct the right foundation.
What happened to 23andMe is a cautionary tale. It is also a catalyst. If we heed it, we can build a future where genetic data empowers individuals and accelerates science without sacrificing privacy. If we ignore it, we risk handing the keys to our biology to the highest bidder.
The choice is ours.
Watch: Teranode & the Web3 world with edge-to-edge electronic value system
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Source: https://coingeek.com/big-ideas-series-part-1-tokenized-genetics/
