NEW YORK — Four years ago, Anthony Anzalone lit a $95,000 Banksy print on fire, filmed it, and sold the digital version for nearly four times what he paid. The stunt made him internet-famous as "Burnt Banksy" and kicked off arguments about digital ownership that are still going.
These days, the 27-year-old—who just landed on Forbes' 30 Under 30 Finance list—has evolved his theory into building something that could matter even more. He's developed verification technology that over 150 major brands are using to ensure they're optimizing their user acquisition & engagement spend. Now they are ready to go full launch, save billions, and benefit consumers with earnings as well.
His company is called XION. The platform verifies first-party data across the internet, email, and apps, and enables turning that data into programmable value. And while it found an early niche as a solution for advertising, the tech works across any industry dealing with trusted data problems—insurance, ticketing, dating apps, supply chains, hiring platforms, gaming, healthcare. Basically, anywhere you need to know what's real, by trusting the source of the data.
Bots Are Eating the Internet
The reality is that most people can't tell what's real online anymore, and the numbers back that up.
Bot traffic makes up somewhere between 40% and 80% of all internet activity, depending on which research you look at. Scalpers use automated systems to grab concert tickets before anyone else can click checkout. Dating apps are completely overrun with fake profiles and catfish accounts. Companies dump marketing budgets into clicks that never reach actual people. Supply chains can't keep counterfeit products from slipping through. Job applicants fabricate entire work histories, and nobody catches it until well after they've been hired.
The tools available now mostly fail to solve these problems. Traditional identity verification is intrusive and makes users jump through hoops. Fraud detection systems only trigger after the damage has already happened and the money is gone. CAPTCHA used to work, but bots blow right through them now.
XION built its platform around new technological primitives and a different idea. Verification should happen at the source, with full certainty that the data can't be tampered with in transit, while retaining full user data privacy.
How the Technology Works
The underlying technology relies on advanced mathematics and cryptography, specifically, zero-knowledge proofs. This allows XION to cryptographically prove that data is authentic without revealing the underlying information itself—confirming, for example, that a user is over 18 without exposing their actual birthdate or identity. The verification happens in real-time, creating an immutable record that the data came from a legitimate source and hasn't been altered.
Users don't need to see any of this complexity. The user logs in as they usually would to the platform they're proving information about, and XION's infrastructure operates beneath the surface, confirming authenticity without collecting or storing sensitive personal information.
The backend runs on blockchain technology, but Anzalone made a deliberate choice to remove all cryptocurrency terminology from how the company presents itself. There are no digital wallets to manage. No seed phrases to memorize and keep secure. No technical jargon that tends to alienate mainstream users and prevent the adoption of new systems.
"Nobody wakes up wanting to understand verification infrastructure," Anzalone said in an interview. "They want apps that work and platforms they can trust. That's really it."
Way Beyond Just Fixing Ads
XION started by helping brands eliminate wasted advertising spend caused by bot traffic, but the same verification infrastructure turned out to have applications across wildly different sectors.
Financial services represent one clear use case. Point-of-sale lenders traditionally scare off customers by requiring social security numbers and triggering hard credit pulls just to check eligibility. XION's verification system can instantly verify a user's credit score and financial information directly from platforms like Credit Karma without storing or exposing any sensitive data. Customers get approved in seconds, lenders eliminate document fraud, and nobody has to hand over their social security number to yet another database.
Competitive business acquisition offers another application. Companies trying to poach customers from rivals typically rely on uploaded screenshots or PDFs that are easily faked. Using XION's technology, a challenger platform like Rippling could verify that a prospect actively uses Gusto's payroll system and automatically qualify them for switching incentives—all without any partnership agreement, manual review, or touching actual payroll data. The verification happens at the source, turning competitive customer acquisition into a programmable process instead of a trust-and-hope operation.
Yet another use case can be seen with insurance companies losing tens of billions annually to fraudulent claims while legitimate customers face invasive verification processes that delay payouts during emergencies. XION's technology can verify data directly from the original sources, without requiring claimants to collect and submit stacks of paperwork that can be doctored or fabricated. The system confirms that documentation is authentic and unaltered while keeping sensitive health and financial information private, allowing insurers to process legitimate claims faster while automatically flagging the fabricated ones that cost everyone higher premiums.
The core value proposition is infrastructure-level trust that works for any platform, regardless of what industry it operates in.
What Brands Are Seeing
Anzalone said 150 brands have tested XION's verification technology with millions of consumers. They engaged in over 68 million verified interactions to date. The brands are now convinced that the technology works and are ready to go full throttle, committing millions of dollars for the upcoming launch of a new platform, EarnOS, that will save them millions on customer acquisition costs, and brand loyalists will become more engaged as they receive real-world, instantly usable rewards.
The AI Data Quality Angle
There's another dimension to this technology that becomes more relevant as generative AI systems expand their presence across the internet. The quality of data feeding into these systems matters tremendously.
Artificial intelligence tools are producing synthetic content at a massive scale right now. Machine learning models that get trained on datasets contaminated with bot activity, fabricated engagement metrics, and fraudulent signals will inevitably produce unreliable and flawed outputs. XION's verification layer offers a way to feed AI systems with confirmed signals from actual humans instead, which creates cleaner training datasets and leads to more trustworthy results from these models.
The timing seems notable given how much attention AI safety and data integrity issues are receiving from both academic researchers and government regulators at the moment.
From Burning Art to Building Infrastructure
Anzalone's trajectory from cultural provocateur to infrastructure developer doesn't follow a typical Silicon Valley path. The Banksy burning incident demonstrated that digital representations of physical objects could command substantial monetary value in their own right. But the experiment also surfaced more fundamental questions about how society can establish trust online.
"That moment made me realize we need reliable ways to prove things are actually real in digital spaces," Anzalone explained. "Without that foundation, none of this infrastructure we're building on top has any stability."
His recognition on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list indicates the technology and finance sectors are paying serious attention to what he's building now, though it's worth noting that plenty of young entrepreneurs who appear on those annual lists end up founding companies that never achieve their initial ambitions.
What Happens Next
XION's verification infrastructure is available for builders to utilize now, with mobile compatibility that doesn't require learning new systems or rebuilding existing apps.
The challenges are real, though. Competing against entrenched systems that already work (sort of). Navigating privacy regulations that vary wildly across different countries. Convincing enterprise companies to integrate new technology into critical systems. Staying ahead of fraud operations that keep getting more sophisticated. And figuring out the business model without just becoming another middleman, taking a cut of transactions.
Still, for industries that are actively bleeding billions to fraud and struggling to separate real activity from fake, invisible verification that protects user privacy solves actual problems that haven't had good answers.
Whether XION becomes essential internet plumbing like DNS or cloud storage, or just another ambitious project that couldn't reach critical mass, won't be clear for years.
But Anzalone has already proven he's willing to bet big on unconventional ideas. Burning a Banksy was certainly that. Rebuilding trust across the entire internet is considerably more complex, and potentially more valuable.
If it actually works, it's a much bigger story than any burning artwork.
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