The American dream is “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” but, in practice, it has always been about ownership. Sadly, the dream of ownership is slowly slipping away for many people. Harvard University’s 2025 Youth Poll found that three-quarters say they want to own a home, but barely half think they ever will. Ownership feels increasingly out of reach. That lack of ownership applies not only to our physical property, but to our data as well.
Private data is a powerful asset, even if most Americans don’t realize it. After the 2008 financial crisis, the government mandated that banks allow customers to access their data, but even today, almost two decades later, J.P. Morgan still fights to comply with “open banking.” When corporations hoard private data to create “moats” for user retention, they stifle competition and reduce innovation. Value should not just flow to a handful of corporations but also to the people who actually create it.
The rise of the agentic web – where autonomous AI agents act on behalf of humans – is set to widen the data ownership gap. Today, AI agents crawl the internet, vacuum up content without attribution, and return nothing to users. As we consume apps like ChatGPT and create prompts with deeply personal information, we have become even more prolific creators of valuable private data. That data is the foundation upon which today’s digital and AI economy is built.
To stop this cycle of big companies gobbling up our data for free will require a technological solution and, fortunately, one is on hand. Blockchain can turn users into economic stakeholders in the very digital services they power, and usher in a new era of wealth, participation, and dynamism.
Until recently, blockchains sought to store all your data and execute all your applications —a cumbersome, expensive and slow process. Now, advances in cryptography and design allow builders to offer the privacy and ownership benefits of blockchain but in lighter, easy-to-use packages. These advances can be combined with a feature of blockchain that is sorely missing on the traditional internet: verifiability, or the ability to prove who you are and what you did.
A verifiable internet rests on two pillars: verifiable data and verifiable compute. Verifiable data allows you to prove facts about yourself – like your repayment history, your health deductible, and even your digital reputation—without handing over everything (and, crucially, you don’t need resource-intensive APIs or a company like J.P. Morgan’s permission to access this information). Companies like Opacity Network are digital notaries already powering dozens of applications like Earnifi, which reached #1 for finance in Apple’s App Store.
Verifiable compute is a cryptographic guarantee that proves software executed exactly as it was supposed to, even if it doesn’t run on a blockchain. Companies like EigenLayer, for example, allow you to economically punish software developers of unknown origin if they don’t complete the assigned task correctly. Imagine sharing private health data with a highly specialized healthcare AI agent that wasn’t built by Sam Altman or Elon Musk – now you can.
Together, these technologies give the internet a trust layer that shifts power from large centralized organizations back to individuals and makes true ownership in the digital economy possible for the first time.
Convergence is what happens when a solution meets a problem in a way that unlocks value, adoption, or alignment across systems. This is beginning to occur with blockchain-driven verifiability and data ownership issues that arise with the agentic web.
Things are moving quickly. In the past few months, Congress passed the GENIUS Act as a regulatory framework for non-bank actors to create stablecoins, and payments giant Stripe acquired Privy to embed 80 million digital wallets directly into user settings. Meanwhile, security firm Cloudflare blocked AI agents from crawling online publishers for free and, last month, Google partnered with 60 companies, including PayPal and Deloitte, on a protocol that will let AI agents pay for things using stablecoins.
The initial benefactor of these initiatives will be professional online publishers, but soon it will be all of us—the very people creating the data. Projects like OpenLedger are already showing how users can get paid for sharing their data. The CLARITY Act, which is working its way through the Senate, could make it easier for agents to share ownership via tokens.
The stakes for success are high. Without digital ownership, people remain tenants of the digital economy. With ownership, they become stakeholders with a vested interest in seeing it flourish. A verifiable internet lowers barriers for startups, embeds trust into systems from the start, and gives people new ways to participate in value creation. It restores competition, innovation, and fairness — the real pillars of the American Dream.
Ownership defined the last American century. Blockchain can ensure ownership shapes the next one century by giving people true control over their data – and, in turn, affirming that promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for the digital world.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
