DIRT Protocol, a protocol for decentralized information curation, has raised a $3M in a seed round which saw participation from a number of leading venture capital firms and investors.

“DIRT” stands for Decentralized Incentive Registry Token. Founder Yin Wu explained why she chose the name to Forbes saying:

“There are a lot of projects, especially in the cryptocurrency space, that have names like Galaxy or Multiverse. We need to grow into that name if we’re going to call ourselves something as lofty as that. Dirt is very foundational. We see it as a data layer.”

The seed round was backed by General Catalyst, Greylock Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group, SV Angel, HustleFund, Village Global, #Angels, Elad Gil, Fred Ehrsam, Linda Xie, and others.

Similar to the Wikipedia model, DIRT will allow anyone to contribute information and will curate it using “token staking to incentivize honesty.” Every contributor will need to deposit token to write data. The data so contributed will be freely shared only if it is correct. In case of incorrect data, anyone can challenge the data and earn tokens for identifying the inaccurate facts.

Wu explained the concept while speaking to Business Insider. She said:

"For instance, I could say that I'm willing to put down 10 Dirt tokens on the claim that I graduated from Stanford. But it's not true, so someone could easily say, 'I'm going to put down 10 tokens to challenge that information.'"

In its official announcement, the team explained that the protocol and the platform will make it “economically irrational for misinformation to persist in a data set.”

“DIRT is not a Token Curated Registry (TCR). DIRT is a protocol to build TCRs,” it added.

The team is currently working with partners to build the first applications for DIRT and plans to release the project’s whitepaper in the coming weeks.