No. The Trace compensation model is not based on coin values or speculation. If we are successful, License Revenues will be collected from companies using customary methods when they bring products that use our data to market. Those earnings are then distributed to mining partners in proportion to the HTD they earn from mining task data. Using well-established and regulated cryptocurrency systems is, at this time, the most trustworthy and efficient mechanism to accomplish this task globally at scale. Mining value is reflected in the data aggregated by the TRACE DAO Cooperative, not in the value of HTD tokens or any value based on token speculation or trading. TRACE does not support, endorse, or encourage public trading or speculation in HTD tokens. Only TRACE-verified mining partners can collect licensing revenues or vote in the TRACE DAO based on HTD token holdings.
TRACE uses blockchain to enable a global community of stakeholders to interact seamlessly without the barriers to entry that a conventional, global B2B rollout would entail. Using blockchain, we can establish trusting relationships with our task mining partners globally, verify and authenticate participation, and disburse payment without the enormous costs and logistics hurdles entailed trying to roll out in hundreds of countries at once.
By
“mining” human task data, mining partners earn HTD
tokens. Each token represents a share of the TRACE
DAO and confers both earning and voting rights.
Once we successfully build a multi-petabyte
resource for training AI models, license Revenues
will be collected from companies when they bring
products that use our data to market. Those
earnings will be distributed to mining partners in
proportion to the HTD earned by mining task data.
Usually, each hour of approved task data collected
earns one token. However, miners can earn up to 64
times the normal rate in the first thousands of
hours of data collection, depending on how early
they get started. Depending on market conditions,
the share of licensing revenue might range between
$23 to $170 per token annually. Early adopters
earning 64 tokens per hour could see recurring
annual revenues of $1472 to $10880 for each hour
harvesting approved task data. When TRACE enters
EPOCH 20 (20,000 hours of data collected), those
awards will be half, 32 tokens per hour. For more
information about the potential market and
projected growth, please read the market report.
HTD
tokens can only be earned by collecting verified
task data from everyday leisure or work
activities. We will develop specific guidelines
for approved types of mineable activities, but in
general, any active or dynamic activity should be
mineable. As a verified, producing mining partner
you can send or receive HTD tokens as part of
regular business processes, but speculative,
active trading in HTD may result in sanctions and
is not allowed within the code of ethics that
miners agree to.
TRACE
does not sell HTD tokens; buying or selling them
is not endorsed by TRACE. Only approved mining
partners who have passed KYC with verified
harvested data are entitled to revenue shares from
TRACE tokens. TRACE tokens are transferrable but
do not convey value to holders outside the
verified mining partner pool. TRACE tokens may be
transferred between miners, and their revenue
shares would then accrue to the new token holder
since they are product-generating stakeholders in
the TRACE DAO. Actively advertising TRACE HTD
tokens for sale to the general public violates the
code of ethics that miners must adhere to, and
will result in loss of voting or revenue rights in
the trace DAO.
There
is no charge to become a mining partner. You will
need to go through a KYC process and have your
identity verified. The first group may be
individually selected for the type of data they
may be able to collect. Special task types may be
eligible for increased incentives.
Once registered, Miners will need some proprietary
equipment to collect task data. Miners can build
the equipment using an approved design or purchase
it from a third party. Initially, we will be
working with an in-house manufacturing team to
design, evaluate, and test hardware. During this
time, it may be possible to purchase
pre-production units at production cost directly
from us as we refine the design to meet
bootstrapping production requirements.
The second step is to collect some data and have
it pass approval. First, mining devices must be
registered and provisioned with a unique
production key based on your miner registration
number. Once your first data is approved as
authentic and complete, you will become a verified
mining partner and earn HTD tokens, with the
revenues and voting rights intrinsic to HTD for
verified miners.
Initially,
the data collection equipment will cost around
US$200, but as we optimize designs and
manufacturing processes we expect to be able to
reduce this to about US$100. DIY options may
reduce the cost somewhat, but because of the cost
advantage of purchasing in quantity, the savings
will not be extreme. We are developing DIY
friendly designs as well as ones suited for
factory production. The core electronics for a DIY
design, if carefully sourced, would probably be on
the order of $US80, and would require 3D printable
enclosures and accessories. For people interested
in small scale manufacturing, we will be providing
full Gerber / BOM files for board PCBA as well as
STLs for 3d printing enclosures and accessories.
There are no restrictions on building these for
resale, and we encourage and support efforts to do
so.
Not
really. Aside from the minor annoyances of using
the equipment and uploading/charging daily, you go
about your regular daily routine, doing the usual
tasks. The equipment is easily concealable under
clothing and weighs less than 500g combined. At the end of
the day, toss the sensors on the wireless charger
and verify that the app successfully uploads your
valuable data. If you can’t upload for a few days,
that should be fine; the equipment can store
several days of activity.
Mining
HTD is compensated on-platform with HTD tokens,
which represent shares in the TRACE DAO. Each
share confers 1 vote, and 1 share of future
revenue from commercial licensing of WELL data.
Until the WELL dataset grows to critical
mass, it is unlikely that there will be any
licensing revenue. Once commercial licensing
begins, revenue from license payments will be
distributed to token holders on a 1:1 basis.
Distribution will be through well regulated
stablecoins or other cryptoassets as agreed upon
by the DAO governance. In some cases, in limited
regions, payments may be made in the local
currency. It is important to remember that it will
take some time to build the WELL dataset, and
additional time will pass before commercial
licensing can begin. The value of mining HTD is
entirely dependent on the success of the TRACE DAO
cooperative in building and promoting the WELL
data set. TRACE is not a get-rich quick scheme.
Licensing revenues will be generated over a period
of time parallel with technology development and
market growth. If we are successful, we expect
that it will be highly lucrative for TRACE DAO
members, but it will not happen overnight.
The
data contributed to the WELL data set will be used
to train AI models. The data is reviewed for
usability, labeled, categorized, and processed.
TRACE or its associates or licensees may manually
review the data. Your data will not have your name
directly attached to it, and we will not
voluntarily divulge user details, but it should
not be considered securely private or anonymous.
After all, you are harvesting data to be licensed
into commercial products in exchange for a share
of that revenue. Due to its incorporation into AI
training data, data uploaded to the WELL training
set should be considered indelible as a practical
matter and permanently in the public domain for
research or development purposes. When the well
dataset is licensed for commercial applications,
verified miners will receive a share of licensing
revenues in proportion to the HTD tokens held by
each miner.
Right
now, TRACE is still in early development. For now,
the best thing you can do to prepare for mining is
to contribute to the community in our Telegram
group, share us on social media, and help spread
the word. Make sure to tag us so we can see your
contributions. We will be
looking for community promoters and moderators. If
you feel you might be able to make more direct
contributions with your skillset, hit us up on
Telegram @exosequitur or @drakesmyth in the Trace
community chat. Early adopters and contributors
will have the opportunity to be a formative core
of the TRACE DAO Cooperative.
After
the Pre-Alpha and private alpha, we will invite
early adopters to participate in the
invitation-only beta phase one, which will add 100
new miners to the pool. After the private alpha,
we will make our hardware designs open to the
public and accessible for point-and-click assembly
on various PCBA platforms, as well as available in
limited quantities from our in-house
manufacturing.
It sounds exclusive, but what matters in getting
invited to beta-1 is the type of tasks you will be
able to add to the WELL data set and your
community participation. In early registration, we
will ask about the types of tasks that you might
be able to mine and how many hours a week you will
be able to contribute, and we will make a
selection based on that information.
After the network runs smoothly with ~500 users,
we will open to the public and move toward
full production.
If you
have strong ML or LLM/VLA/LBM skills, have
experience in social media outreach, are skilled
in embedded development, or have strong EDA
skills, we might be interested in hearing from
you. We are not hiring at the moment, but are open
to incentivized collaboration on a speculative
basis.
No.
HTD tokens are only generated by harvesting
verified Human Task Data and uploading it to the
WELL data set. For each hour of verified training
data, 2 tokens will be generated. One goes to the
miner, and the other goes to the TRACE DAO.
Licensing revenues collected by the TRACE DAO in
parallel with miners will be used to fund work on
increasing the value of TRACE data through the
generation of optimized and synthetic datasets,
new ways to collect HTD, and AI foundation models
for open source distribution. Individual people
associated with TRACE, the TRACE team, and other
related people may choose to participate in mining
HTD on a personal basis, but the DAO earnings do
not accrue to founders on an individual basis.
Issues
brought to a vote by the board or by referendum
will be voted on in a one token, one vote basis,
with only verified addresses being eligible to
cast votes. Although the TRACE DAO will initially
hold a 50% share in all DAO votes, several
organizations are to be formed and the DAO tokens
decentralized among them to create a balance of
incentives.
At this point the plan for the eventual structure
of the TRACE ecosystem is as follows:
Miners: 50% allocation.
TRACE DAO - (20% allocation) Business management.
Represents primarily the interests of active
miners and verified token holders.
CLEVER - (20%) Technological value add. Dedicated
to increasing the value of the WELL data through
technological means, as well as specific data
collection projects for client verticals.
HTD Standards Organization - (4%) Creates,
maintains, and licenses standards and
certifications for the collection and processing
of robotic training data. Licensing revenues
accrue to the TRACE DAO.
Skunkworks (5%) - Maintains a managed fund for
investment in research grants, product
development, and technical facilitation for key
verticals in order to broaden the value,
licensability, and business impact of WELL data.
TRACE ethics and standards (1%) - To fund R&D
on ethical and social issues related to pervasive
automation. Develops behavioral strategies and
training sets to improve ethical robotics as well
as robotic safety protocols. Focus will be on
improving robotic / societal relations, robot
utility to both owners and non-owners, as well as
optimizing for social factors and socioeconomic
impacts.
Together, these institutions and the mining
community should form a cohesive set of diverse
but aligned interests to help steer, maintain, and
expand the availability and application of
human-centric robotic training data in the rapidly
growing field of general purpose humanoid robotic
automation.
Like
any venture at the frontier of technology, the
success of TRACE depends on market conditions and
technical advancements that are still in a state
of development. Those conditions may not
materialize or may develop in unpredictable ways.
Fortunately, as a mining partner, your risks would
be minimal. Aside from some wasted time and some
minor inconvenience, there are no significant
risks for miners. TRACE is not pay-to-play. Even
the open-source data collection equipment can be
repurposed for other applications if TRACE fails
to achieve its goals in bringing prosperity to
miners and democratized access to robotic
technology.
Other than the apparent risks from competition,
disaster, legal or regulatory risks, and other
force majeure factors, there are risks that:
Miners may not respond to the value proposition or
will balk at the unavoidable cost of equipment
acquisition. (We are working hard to bring the
cost of equipment down as low as possible)
The data collected may not be helpful enough for
training SOTA LBMs at the scale we anticipate in
the future.
SOTA Robotics AI implementations may evolve
rapidly away from LBM/VLAs and other
neural-network-based technology that can utilize
the provided training data.
TRACE
sensor hardware captures multiple data types
simultaneously. The body-worn LMT nodes record
inertial motion data: acceleration, rotation,
and magnetic orientation from a 9-axis IMU at
high sample rates. The MMT hub device adds
video, audio, and spatial context. Together,
these produce a rich multi-modal record of
how a person moves through and interacts with
their environment during ordinary tasks.
This combination is what makes the WELL dataset
valuable for training embodied AI. Simulations
and lab recordings can capture motion or video
independently, but the synchronized multi-modal
data from real unstructured environments is
what robotic foundation models need and what
the industry currently lacks at scale.
Mining
partners should understand clearly what they are
consenting to: the use of their collected data
to train artificial intelligence models.
Inertial motion data (accelerometer, gyroscope,
magnetometer) is deidentified and does not
inherently reveal who collected it. Video and
audio data is more difficult to fully
deidentify. TRACE will handle all data
responsibly and will adhere to relevant data
privacy standards and regulations in the
jurisdictions where we operate.
Your data will not have your name directly
attached to it, and we will not voluntarily
divulge miner identity. However, due to the
nature of video and audio, collected data
should not be considered fully anonymous.
Data contributed to the WELL dataset should
be considered permanent, as it will be
incorporated into AI training processes that
cannot practically be reversed.
TRACE
is a multinational organization with team members
in the United States, the Dominican Republic,
and other countries. As a decentralized project
building for a global mining community, we are
structured to operate across jurisdictions. We
anticipate rapid expansion in mining partners
representing every nation on earth.
For more about the team and our technology, see
the about page.
This
is the question underneath everything we do.
Current AI models trained on human text have
absorbed something that functions like a conscience.
They will not choose to harm people of their own
volition. That disposition was not designed in by
any ethics committee. It emerged because the
statistical weight of human culture leans toward
life mattering.
The same principle applies to robotic AI. The
character of these systems is shaped by their
training data, and that character is being
determined now. Models trained on narrow,
sanitized task demonstrations will produce capable
tools. Models trained on the full texture of human
cooperation and physical culture have a chance of
producing something closer to genuine
collaborators.
That is the deeper reason TRACE exists. The
economic model for miners and the market
opportunity are real, but they serve a larger
purpose: building the training data infrastructure
that gives robotic AI its best chance of
understanding what it means to share space with
humans.
The founder has written extensively on these
topics:
Still Ours
To Lose - On the emergent conscience in AI
and what happens if we remove it
Standing
With Giants - Bengio, Hinton, LeCun, and
why intrinsic safety matters more than
guardrails
On the
Character of Thinking Machines - The
economic, ethical, and technical case for
getting the foundations right
The
Weight(s) of What We Build - What happens
when autonomous systems no longer need us
More writing at Bogon
Flux on Substack.
In private alpha - public beta coming soon
Check the FAQ