What If Users Could Finally Participate in the Value Their Data Creates?

Every year, brands spend well over one trillion dollars acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones. Advertising, referral programmes, creator partnerships, affiliate marketing, loyalty campaigns and promotional incentives all compete for the same outcome: building meaningful relationships with the right people.

For decades, the customer acquisition economy has grown around users rather than with them. Businesses pay advertising platforms to reach potential customers, data brokers aggregate behavioural signals, algorithms estimate intent, and intermediaries capture much of the value created along the way. The people whose behaviour makes those systems valuable rarely participate directly in the economic upside.

That imbalance has become increasingly apparent as digital services have become more deeply embedded in our everyday lives. Every purchase, subscription, investment, review or transaction contributes to a digital reputation that says something meaningful about who we are and what products might genuinely interest us. Those signals are incredibly valuable to brands. Entire industries have emerged to infer, aggregate and monetise them.

Yet users themselves have traditionally had very little agency over how that value is created.

We believe that is beginning to change.

One company leading this shift is EarnOS. Its vision is refreshingly simple: if people create value for brands, they should be able to participate in that value directly. Through its consumer app, ero, members are paid to prove specific facts about accounts they already hold -– that they subscribe to Revolut Premium, hold an Uber One membership, ride frequently enough to count as a power user, or buy at volume through Shop.app. A brand can then reward exactly that audience, and pay for a signal it can verify rather than one it has inferred. Rather than treating users as passive audiences to target, EarnOS is building a platform where brands reward people for verified participation, meaningful engagement and relevant digital reputation. In doing so, it is redefining what customer rewards can look like in an internet built around transparency, consent and mutual value creation.

Making that vision possible requires a new kind of trust infrastructure.

That's where Vouch comes in.

We're excited to announce that Vouch is now one of the key verification providers supporting live EarnOS campaigns through our zkTLS-powered verification infrastructure. More importantly, we're excited by what this collaboration represents: a future where users can unlock opportunities from the digital reputation they've already built while remaining fully in control of their personal information.

Better rewards require better trust

For years, businesses wanting to understand prospective customers faced an uncomfortable trade-off. They could collect broad amounts of personal information, ask users to upload screenshots or documents, or rely on increasingly unreliable probabilistic signals generated by advertising platforms. None of these approaches are particularly satisfying.

At the same time, people have become far more conscious of how their personal information is used. Very few users are comfortable granting blanket access to financial accounts or social profiles simply to qualify for a reward or participate in a campaign. The expectation is increasingly clear: if data is shared, it should happen knowingly, for a specific purpose, and with a clear benefit in return.

That doesn't mean brands need less information. Quite the opposite.

The most valuable customer signals are often highly specific. A campaign may benefit from knowing that someone has been a Coinbase user for several years, maintains a Revolut Premium subscription, actively uses Wise for international payments or has built deep expertise on Vivino. These kinds of attributes help brands create more relevant campaigns, reward the right audiences and better understand both existing and prospective customers.

The challenge has always been accessing those signals without requiring users to surrender control over everything else.

Privacy doesn't have to come at the expense of relevance

This is the problem Vouch was built to solve.

Using zkTLS, Vouch enables users to generate cryptographic proofs from private account data while revealing only the specific attribute a campaign actually requires. Rather than exposing an entire account, users selectively prove a single fact. They always know exactly what information is being verified, why it is being requested and what they will receive in return.

ero never receives unrestricted access to the underlying account. It receives only the verified result.

This seemingly small distinction fundamentally changes the relationship between users and brands. Instead of passive data collection happening behind the scenes, every proof becomes an intentional exchange. Users remain in control of their information while brands receive trustworthy, high-quality signals that are far more valuable than anonymous advertising data or self-declared claims.

That creates a better foundation for customer rewards.

EarnOS is building the next generation of customer rewards

This is precisely why EarnOS is such an exciting partner.

Rather than building yet another rewards programme, EarnOS is rethinking how brands and consumers interact in the first place. Brands no longer have to rely exclusively on impressions, clicks or demographic assumptions. Instead, they can reward people based on verified characteristics, genuine engagement and meaningful digital reputation.

For users, that changes the relationship entirely.

Their digital history is no longer something that creates value only for platforms. It becomes something they can consciously choose to leverage in exchange for rewards that are relevant to them. The decision always remains theirs. In ero, that decision is a straightforward one: here is the campaign, here is the attribute it needs, here is what you earn.

Behind the scenes, Vouch provides one of the verification layers that makes this possible.

Our zkTLS infrastructure is already supporting multiple live EarnOS campaigns across a growing portfolio of data sources, including Coinbase, Revolut, Wise, Kalshi, Shop.app and Vivino, with several additional integrations already in development. Every new integration expands the types of customer rewards brands can offer while creating more opportunities for members to benefit from the digital reputation they have already built.

Building a better internet economy

What excites us most about this collaboration is not simply another integration. It's the broader direction it points towards.

For decades, the internet has largely monetised user data on users' behalf. We believe the next generation of consumer applications will increasingly allow people to participate directly in the value those data points create—not by selling their personal information, but by selectively proving relevant attributes under their own terms.

EarnOS is demonstrating what those experiences can look like. Vouch provides the privacy-preserving verification infrastructure that allows them to scale with trust.

We often describe this capability as verifiable user acquisition: enabling brands to build acquisition and engagement strategies around trusted, privacy-preserving proofs rather than opaque data collection or probabilistic targeting. We believe it will become one of the foundational building blocks of the next generation of internet applications.

EarnOS shows why.

By redefining customer rewards around transparency, user choice and verified participation, it offers a compelling glimpse of a future where everyone benefits. Brands build stronger relationships with the right audiences. Users participate directly in the value they create. And trust is established not through excessive data collection, but through selective, user-controlled proof.

That feels like a much healthier foundation for the internet economy we're all building.

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