Web3Port Foundation: Why We Invested in CARV

The Web3Port Foundation has recently successfully completed a new round of investment in the CARV project. This financing was led by the Web3Port Foundation and involved several well-known institutions. CARV is the largest modular data layer (IDL) in the gaming and artificial intelligence (AI) fields, aimed at addressing significant challenges in current data usage and sharing, enabling users to control, manage, and profit from their personal data.

Background: The Need for Digital Identity and Data Management in Web3

As the Web3 ecosystem continues to evolve, digital identity management and data sovereignty face severe challenges. Particularly in areas such as identity fragmentation, privacy protection, and cross-chain interoperability, the current infrastructure struggles to meet the needs of users and the industry.

1. Identity Fragmentation and Limited Data Capacity: In the existing Web2 and Web3 environments, users' identities and data are scattered across multiple platforms and chains, resulting in fragmentation. This dispersion limits users' ability to operate across chains, hinders the establishment of trust systems, and poses significant obstacles for industries (such as advertising and finance) that require data integration.
2. Data Sovereignty and Privacy Issues: In the Web2 model, centralized companies own and control user data, while users themselves cannot benefit from it. The promise of Web3 is to return data sovereignty to users, allowing them to control their data and derive value from it. However, achieving this goal requires robust decentralized infrastructure to ensure data privacy and security.
3. Integration Challenges between Web2 and Web3: There is a significant gap between Web2 and Web3 in terms of identity management and data processing. Web2 applications find it difficult to seamlessly integrate with Web3's decentralized identity systems, leading to friction for developers and users operating between the two ecosystems. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a unified framework to address these integration issues.

Solutions Provided by CARV

CARV aims to provide a decentralized, integrated, and privacy-focused data management solution through its modular data layer (IDL), helping users gain more control and benefits within the Web3 ecosystem.

The CARV solution primarily consists of the following three core products:

1. CARV Protocol: The CARV Protocol is a modular data layer (IDL) for the gaming and AI fields, helping users manage, share, and monetize their data. This protocol provides a complete framework for decentralized identity verification, data storage, data processing, and model training.
2. CARV Play: This is an AI-driven super application designed for gamers, offering data-driven game analytics, social interactions, and game discovery features. Through CARV Play, gamers can build a complete personal profile (SBT/GAT) on a single platform, record gaming experiences, participate in events, and earn rewards.
3. CARV AI Agent (CARA): This is a personalized AI gaming assistant designed to help players optimize their gaming experience. CARA can seamlessly integrate with Web3 wallets and provide on-chain game recommendations and reward tasks.

Technical Architecture of the CARV Protocol

The CARV Protocol employs a five-layer modular architecture, ensuring full lifecycle management of data within a secure and privacy-protecting framework. These five layers are:

1. Identity Layer: The core of the CARV Protocol is CARV ID, a decentralized identity system that allows users to autonomously create and manage their digital identities. This layer can seamlessly integrate across Web2 and Web3 ecosystems, ensuring users have absolute control over their identities and data.
2. Data Storage Layer: Provides flexible and scalable data storage solutions, allowing users to choose appropriate storage methods based on cost-effectiveness and storage durability needs. Whether local storage or on-chain storage, CARV ensures the security and privacy of data.
3. Computation and Training Layer: Supports complex tasks such as AI model training and data processing, utilizing Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) to ensure the security and privacy of sensitive data during processing. Processed data must be verified before entering the next layer for execution.
4. Execution Layer: The execution layer operates on a decentralized consensus-driven framework, ensuring that data processing, verification, and value distribution are transparent and efficient. This layer is responsible for reward distribution based on user data interactions, maintaining fairness and transparency throughout the system.
5. Verification Layer: The verification layer relies on community validators to ensure the accuracy and security of TEE operations. Validators play a key role in confirming the normal operation of the IDL system, including cross-chain communication and data integrity.

The identity and data layer (IDL) within the CARV Protocol redefines the management, evaluation, and monetization of data in the Web3 ecosystem, bringing significant benefits to users and enterprises.

• For users: With the CARV Protocol, everyone can now own, control, verify, and monetize their data, fundamentally changing the way data is used and shared by ensuring privacy, ownership, and control remain firmly in the hands of individuals, paving the way for a future where data creates value for all.
• For enterprises: For businesses, the CARV Protocol can provide high-quality, privacy-protected, and compliant user data, enabling them to gain valuable insights, improve operational efficiency, and build trust with users.

CARV Products and Ecosystem

1. CARV Play: An AI-driven super application built on the CARV Protocol, currently boasting over 2.7 million registered users, supporting both Web2 and Web3 gamers. The platform provides data-driven game recommendations, social interactions, and a rewards system for players. CARV Play also offers developers a rich set of tools (such as game distribution and data analytics) to better engage and retain players. CARV Play hosts various events on its activity page in collaboration with game partners, including social events, in-game activities, live streams, AMAs, beta tests, global cultural festivals, etc., all with exclusive rewards.
2. CARV AI Agent (CARA): CARA is an intelligent personal assistant designed to help users with game recommendations, task assignments, and data services within the CARV and cryptocurrency ecosystem. CARA can seamlessly integrate with Web3 wallets, helping users easily manage their gaming assets and tasks. CARA aims to provide CARV users and the broader crypto world with a more intelligent and intent-driven Q&A experience, and in the near future, it will offer more personalized and customized data services, recommendation services, and advertising services.

CARV Achievements:

• CARV Protocol: Enables over 900 gaming and AI companies across Web2 and Web3 (such as Electronic Arts, Netmarble, AliCloud) to leverage data as a commodity in unique ways that meet their business needs, including NPC training, user understanding, and anti-cheat mechanisms. Through CARV ID (ERC7231 standard NFT), over 920K individuals have been included in the "passive income lifetime membership." The decentralized confidential computing layer of the CARV Protocol ensures privacy protection, compliance with policies, and the redistribution of value to millions of data contributors and owners.
• CARV Play: Provides enhanced gaming experiences for 2.7 million registered Web2 and 3 gamers, allowing them to share data, build credentials, play games, and earn rewards. CARV has become one of the largest ecosystems, with over 1.3 million unique active wallets (UAW) across various blockchain networks such as zkSync, Linea, opBNB, Ronin, TON, SOL, ARB, and over 40 other chains. With over $1 million in MRR, CARV Play has integrated and supported over 790 Web2 and 3 games and ecosystems, such as Illuvium, Off the Grid, Aperion, Pixelmon, etc., for targeted user acquisition, user understanding, and player retention management. It has generated $4 million in revenue from business partners and $2 million in revenue from users.

Financing Situation

Since 2022, CARV has completed multiple rounds of financing, with total funding exceeding $50 million:

1. November 2022: CARV completed a $4 million financing at a $40 million valuation, led by Vertex, with other investors including Infinity Ventures Crypto, W3GG, etc.
2. December 2023: CARV announced the completion of a strategic financing round, with investors including HashKey Capital, Alibaba, etc.
3. April 2024: CARV completed a $10 million Series A financing, with investors including IOSG Ventures, OKX Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, etc.
4. June 2024: CARV raised $35 million in a new round of financing, with investors including Animoca Brands, Intella X, etc.

Additionally, in September 2024, CARV launched a $50 million accelerator program, CARV Labs, focusing on innovation and development in the decentralized data ecosystem.

Tokenomics

$CARV is the native utility token of the CARV ecosystem, used as a medium of exchange within its platform. It grants players or individuals data ownership, controls access to player groups and databases for games or projects, and allows participation in governance for ecosystem development. The utility and use cases of $CARV include community governance, gas fee payments, game asset purchases, gated access, protocol incentives, and network node operations.

The total supply of $CARV is 1,000,000,000, and it will be gradually unlocked over four years. Its distribution includes: nodes and community (50%, incentivizing the community to contribute to the project in various ways), ecosystem and treasury (9%), early investors (9.246%, including seed round and early strategic investors), private placement (8.295%, for investors participating in private placements from Series A and beyond), founding team and advisors (19.459%), and liquidity (4%).

The $CARV token will debut in October 2024 on exchanges such as Bitget, Bybit, Kucoin, Gate, HashKey Global, and has also launched on South Korea's largest exchange, Upbit. Currently, its price trend is favorable, showing good growth and market attention since its launch.

Roadmap and Future Plans

The CARV project has achieved its first and second phase goals, including the launch of the CARV Protocol, CARV Play application, and CARV AI Bot. In the future, CARV will continue to advance its third phase goals of unified identity, data, and cross-chain communication. CARV plans to promote the overall development of the Web3 ecosystem by further expanding decentralized data management and monetization capabilities.

Conclusion

CARV is the largest modular data layer (IDL) in the gaming and AI fields, building a powerful ecosystem through the CARV Protocol and two flagship products, CARV Play and CARV AI, deploying multiple applications across major blockchains such as Linea, BNB Chain, zkSync, and Ronin, serving over 2.7 million gamers.

As a leading project in modular data layers, CARV has significant advantages in technical architecture, ecosystem, and user experience. With the increasing importance of decentralized identity and data layers (IDL) in the Web3 ecosystem, CARV will continue to play a core role in the gaming and AI fields, driving the prosperous development of the Web3 ecosystem.