DrumWave unveiled its dWallet platform and Data Savings Account, marking a potential paradigm shift in how individuals and businesses control and monetize personal data.
After seven years of under-the-radar R&D, the launch comes at a crucial moment when the global data monetization market, valued at $3.4 billion in 2023, is projected to surge at 25.8 percent CAGR through 2030. However, consumers are unable to profit from the value of the data they generate. Yet despite U.S. consumers spending an average of $3,300 annually on devices, internet, mobile plans, and streaming services, they’ve remained unable to capture any meaningful value from the data they generate through these services.
“It’s all about autonomy,” explains André Vellozo, CEO and founder of DrumWave. “Today, our money is in the bank, and our data is in the cloud. We control our money, deciding when and how to use it. But with data, we’re powerless—it’s held in someone else’s cloud, where others profit from it, sometimes even against our interests. We are all data-poor and need to become data-rich.”
Breaking the Data Value Chain to Benefit All
The newly launched dWallet platform represents a fundamental shift in the data economy, enabling both individuals and companies to contribute data and begin accumulating wealth from their daily digital footprint. For the first time, personal data can be transformed into a tangible asset with real monetary value.
This development aligns perfectly with Money20/20’s 2024 theme, “Human X Machine,” which explores how human-machine interactions are reshaping the financial landscape. The platform allows businesses to join the dWallet ecosystem, where they can contribute, exchange, or make offers for data ownership — creating a new marketplace for this digital asset.
Brittany Kaiser, newly appointed as DrumWave’s Chief Evangelist, emphasizes the platform’s transformative potential: “For years, I’ve been saying that the most valuable asset in the world, our data, has been harvested, collected, modeled, and monetized — just to sell products to us — but nobody has come up with a solution to address the root of the problem yet. With the dWallet platform, a visionary solution now exists to bring all the players in the ecosystem together in a way that fundamentally respects data ownership.”
Technical Innovation Meets Huge Market Opportunity
Behind DrumWave’s consumer-friendly interface lies a sophisticated technical infrastructure.
The platform addresses crucial challenges in the data economy, including data sovereignty, fragmentation, custody, and valuation.
Laura Bermudez, DrumWave’s CTO, highlights how the new, first-of-its-kind solution establishes new standards for data management: “Most platforms struggle with data integrity and provenance, but DrumWave establishes a new standard for data management. We validate data authenticity while providing unprecedented ways to combine data from multiple sources and industries.”
The open, cloud-based architecture supports seamless integration for data agents and developers while maintaining security and controlled access to data in its original location. This technical foundation, protected by multiple patents, transforms data from a cost center into a profit center for businesses while enabling new consumer opportunities.
“By partnering with DrumWave, companies can now join and help grow a new data ecosystem, attracting consumers who increasingly value data ownership,” notes Germán Scipioni, Chief Product Officer at DrumWave. “Businesses will gain a triple advantage: offering value-added products and services, attracting the next generation of data-savvy users, and creating new revenue streams.”
As the financial industry grapples with the intersection of technology and consumer rights, DrumWave’s launch represents a potential solution to one of the digital age’s most pressing challenges: returning data ownership — and its value — to the individuals and businesses that generate it.
How It Works
Industry Leaders at Money20/20 USA Call for Paradigm Shift in Data Ownership
In a compelling main-stage discussion at Money20/20 USA, DrumWave’s panelists made a powerful case for revolutionizing data ownership, suggesting that consumers could tap into revenue streams currently monopolized by tech giants. The session, “Data ownership and AI can get us beyond better,” brought together key figures in the data rights movement to explore how regulating AI inputs, rather than outputs, could reshape the digital economy.
Digital identity expert and investor Bianca Lopes moderated the distinguished panel, which included DrumWave CEO André Vellozo, data rights activist Brittany Kaiser (known for her role in uncovering social media’s misuse of data as covered in Netflix’s “The Great Hack”), and data scholar Michael Clark. Their discussion painted a picture of an imminent transformation in how personal data is valued, owned, and monetized.
In one of the session’s most striking moments, Vellozo held up his iPhone to make a point about the overlooked economics of data generation. “Who pays for the energy, for the carrier, for the apps and subscriptions on our smartphones?” he asked. “Consumers around the world are paying to process about 50 percent of the data on the planet.” He emphasized that users generate over 402 million terabytes of data daily, yet see none of the value returned.
The scale of this untapped value became clear when Kaiser referenced Mark Zuckerberg’s Congressional testimony. “Facebook (now Meta) averages about $48 per user per quarter in revenue from users’ data,” she revealed. “If you do the math on that, it’s more than $576B in yearly income based on his testimony under oath.”
From Privacy to Property Rights
Kaiser, drawing from her experience as a whistleblower and human rights lawyer, emphasized a crucial shift in approach to data regulation. “When you flip the script to data being a property right — because we pay to create it, and it’s our data after all — there’s a lot more legal precedent to support regulatory innovation,” she explained.
She outlined three critical pillars for change:
- Education and digital literacy
- Legislative and regulatory reform, with “a surge of different jurisdictions warming up to data ownership”
- Technological infrastructure to enable practical implementation
Vast and Perpetual Economic Potential
Data scholar Michael Clark painted a picture of unprecedented economic opportunity. “The real power in data is that it’s limitless. It’s like gravity,” he stated. “What it is at nine o’clock in the morning is not what it is at five past nine.” He highlighted that 97 percent of health data remains unused today, representing massive untapped potential.
During the session, Vellozo and Kaiser introduced groundbreaking concepts, including:
- Data-based retirement plans starting at birth
- College savings plans powered by family data contributions
- Novel lending products using data as collateral
The platform aims to enable businesses to “manage and monetize consumer data with security and transparency,” while allowing consumers to participate in the value creation process.
The panel concluded with a strong emphasis on the transformative potential of proper data ownership structures. “Just like retirement represents building wealth, we believe data generates value from the moment it’s created,” Vellozo explained, introducing DrumWave’s new dWallet and Data Savings Accounts.
For businesses attending Money20/20, the message was clear: the future of finance will be built on collaborative data ownership, enabling “perpetual, realtime, enriched data streams” that benefit both companies and consumers. This new paradigm promises to create unprecedented opportunities for value creation while resolving long-standing issues of data rights and monetization.
A New Silicon Valley Star in the Making
In a move rich with Silicon Valley symbolism, DrumWave recently announced its relocation to 2465 Latham Street in Mountain View, CA — the iconic former headquarters of General Magic, a pioneering company that helped shape the modern mobile computing era. The move comes amid significant expansion, with the company doubling its workforce and strengthening its presence across product, marketing, engineering, and operations divisions.
The company’s growth trajectory has been marked by strategic C-suite appointments that signal its ambitious vision. Following the 2023 addition of Patrick Hruby, a Google and Facebook veteran, as Chief Operations Officer, DrumWave has further bolstered its executive team with two industry powerhouses: Bermudez as Chief Technology Officer and Scipioni as Chief Product Officer, both bringing extensive PayPal expertise to their roles.
Scipioni, whose 10-year tenure at PayPal (2004-2014) established him as the company’s top patent holder, brings a track record of building billion-dollar businesses. His achievements include scaling PayPal’s prepaid card business to over $300 million in volume within two years and launching the PayPal MyCash Program to $100 million in first-year revenue. Perhaps most notably, he revolutionized digital gifting by creating PayPal Digital Gifts, introducing a groundbreaking 60-second purchase process.
“DrumWave’s mission is tightly aligned to my personal mission of using software to improve the health and wealth of every person,” said Scipioni. “While we’ve made great strides in respecting the individual dignity and autonomy of every human being, it’s now time that we provide a way to respect the value of recording what they do in living their lives and share that value in helping them continue to thrive.”
Bermudez brings equally impressive credentials from her 14-year executive tenure at eBay (2004-2018), where she led engineering teams across multiple high-profile brands. At StubHub, she directed engineering efforts in catalog, sell, and social domains. Her PayPal experience includes leading crucial initiatives in credit issuing and acquiring, debit, bank transfer, funding mix, foreign exchange, merchant reporting, and eBay integration.
Vellozo frames DrumWave’s mission as addressing a fundamental imbalance in the digital age:
“Data ownership is at the heart of everything today. Tech companies now control our conversations, transactions, and even our relationships. And the more one side knows more than the other, the harder it becomes to trust — that’s why trust breaks down when there’s an imbalance of information,” he explained. “It’s no wonder that, in a world where everyone is connected, it often feels like we’re more isolated than ever before.”
Looking ahead, Vellozo envisions DrumWave as the bridge between two transformative technological waves: “We are building the missing link between the mobile and AI revolutions. This is the fusion of information and value, data and money, to serve the consumer. It’s never been done before. We want to set the standard for how everyone owns, saves, invests and monetizes data.”
Spencer Hulse is the Editorial Director at Grit Daily. He is responsible for overseeing other editors and writers, day-to-day operations, and covering breaking news.
