Addressable.io has raised $7.5 million to match crypto wallets to their owners using social media data. According to a TechCrunch report, the company raised a seed round led by Viola Ventures, Fabric Ventures, Mensch Capital Partners, and North Island Ventures.
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Deanonymizing Crypto Wallets For Marketing Purposes?
According to the report, addressable can identify crypto wallets to Twitter accounts. The company has reviewed more than 500 million wallets and 100 million social media accounts.
Using this data, Addressable creates an algorithm that matches this information. The company was founded by Tomer Shatorni, the current CEO, Tomer Shlomo, the current CTO, and Asaf Nadle, the current Chief Scientist.
Addressable wants to remove the anonymous feature of the crypto wallet to take marketing to the Web3 sector. The company claims that merchants can unlock new opportunities by matching users to crypto wallets and targeting users according to their balance.
This mechanism has the potential to, according to reports, increase the company’s marketing return on investment (ROI) by several orders of magnitude. Sharoni told TechCrunch the following:
Addressable.io competes with other Web3 CRM startups such as Blaze, Cookie3, Kazm and Absolute Labs, which focus primarily on customer reactivation by analyzing and engaging the company’s existing chain user base. (Addressable.io takes) a more holistic and comprehensive approach by unlocking all Web3 on-chain users.
Many projects and founders have been working on privacy solutions in crypto to improve this feature. In the Ethereum ecosystem, inventor Vitalik Buterin has discussed the implementation of zero-knowledge proofs and similar technologies to improve user privacy.
In the Bitcoin ecosystem, miners approve the “Taproot” upgrade to increase privacy in this blockchain. The crypto industry values privacy as a feature, not a bug, with multiple use cases for journalists, charities, and other groups that want to transact anonymously.
In that sense, Addressable could endanger the identities of millions of users by handing them over to companies for “marketing purposes” without their consent.