Decentralization and the Data Economy - Panel

utilization in the data economy hey everyone how's everyone's week so far yeah enjoying the talk the long lines and happy hours and after parties all right so my name is tong tong i'm the co-founder of ember data we are you probably heard of us we are a digital asset data provider and we combine on-chain data with market data and trading data and so we can provide a comprehensive view and data insights into the entire crypto economy and we serve financial institutions token projects d5 projects so they can do trading and research but enough about me and today i welcome my panel here and i'll first pass the mic for them to introduce themselves to you guys hi folks i'm jonathan padilla i was the former global head of blockchain strategy at paypal and so you're welcome for the bull market in 2020 and currently i'm the ceo of secretary labs at sticker to work committed to a future where we see nfts as being an incredible source of data for web3 we do this on a multi-chain basis and believe that nfts will be in similar similar ways to cookies why the company is named after a cookie and our kind of ethos and values are very much focused on individuals controlling owning and monetizing their data and this is going to become a critical piece of the web 3 infrastructure and frankly a web 3 social contract where individuals are put first as opposed to you know web one which is the state of nature and web 2 which has effectively been digital feudalism with big corporations owning and controlling that data and frankly taking all the monetary value so great to be here today and thanks for having us almost got it the applause is coming it's there uh so i'm shiv malik i'm the ceo of pool uh formerly uh a investigative journalist with the guardian author of a couple of books and been in this space since 2017 with gollum and then streamer and with pool or intending to do is build out an infrastructure layer for these things called data unions uh there's actually a talk uh by a couple of data union builders at about 8 30 this evening so it's clearly growing um and the data union helps people aggregate their data as a collective uh helps monetize that and then share the revenue out with the members of those collectives so they can be things like a web browser plugin for web data they can use open banking laws in europe uh to do the same thing with financial transaction data and they're all sort of taking off swash has about a quarter of a million members now which makes it one of the largest stats around so that's pretty impressive as the ecosystem is starting to really take off right hey everyone my name is ryan i'm co-founder and ceo of foam space we work on the foam protocol it's primarily about providing a new form of location services that work independent of gps over a radio based system this is meant to provide a new primitive for width web 3 of a location proof that can be fraud proof and private because currently things like gps can be spoofed and are not viable in a trustless way for decentralized economies so this would be a kind of new piece of infrastructure that can do things like unlock payments prove you're at this conference next year to get a unique nft things for deliveries and supply chain and all kinds of things so this is about new forms of data about where you go uh moving away from web 2 companies tracking that and taking control of your data uh in a new way so looking forward to the panel so since you have the mic ryan will start with you then um location that location data is very interesting i think with covet that kind of forever changed the way we're thinking operate and you know it's a once in a lifetime hopefully um location where you're like oh my gosh this is covered pandemic happening and a lot of the um you know contact tracing it's really based on location right i kind of want to know if i've been close contact with someone that got tested positive later so i can self quarantine myself but then the same time those type of tracking with the government you know uh checking things like that it's kind of violating my privacy because you're tracking me now so with you know what you're building with location service and in the web 3 applications how do you achieve that balance between being useful and protecting our privacy as well yeah great question so we've seen a lot with location around coveton all these different tracing attempts from like big companies like google or like different things it was always kind of opt-in and people felt apprehensive like you said and so one solution in our approach is uh the location check-in data we call it a presence claim uh and you would interact with a radio zone in your area that's kind of offering the service and the idea is that you're kind of uh keeping that private and applications will then be able to consume this data and so when you have like things like smart contracts you can kind of opt in in a way that's not just like yes i click you can now track me but kind of actually have agency and choose what contracts you're actually revealing this information to uh or even if you had maybe a web of friends you could like set up that some would be automatically alerted but it would just be between your circle or things like that so really just kind of uh bringing location data in a way that's like valuable and trusted so it's not spoofed but also in a way that could be used in privacy but then unlock different events or alerts that's opt-in so you feel like you know people are not tracking who you are but you're able to like opt in who you care about knowing about is one way to think about it awesome now shift um you know web to applications right we're generating so much data and i think we know what is data economy we're talking about here it's essentially how we gather data how we organize data how we exchange data through the whole network of providers and eventually derive value from these aggregated um information right and in web 3 a lot of applications were built and we did many things right and we did many things wrong and uh so in a way like a lot of people nowadays they're sacrificing um well they prefer the value convenience over the privacy right and i would like to be recognized to do this i would like to have a convenience so why is decentralization important in data economy so i think we probably all have a kind of instinctive sense as to why decentralizing data is really important because you can see that the value and the control that a bunch of uh you know handful of companies gaffam have taken over the rest of us why because knowledge is power and they have all of that knowledge right uh and they're worth you know i think collectively 9.5 trillion and and at the same time obviously they're giving us huge amounts of control decentralizing that is now on the agenda of not just the people in web 3 but also legislators in europe for example and actually legislators around most of the hemispheres in the world they realize that actually if you want genuine innovation uh if you want uh you know ecosystems where uh you know people are able to you know for example i'll give you one example in the uk and actually in most countries in the in the west where google operates you basically have two choices for a map app right a decent one you have uh google maps and you have waze also owned by google so you have one choice right that's crazy right why is that so when we live in a world supposedly a wash with innovation and yet there are two basic apps to choose from owned by the same parent company again that hits at the heart of location data right so we know why it's important and i think we made a huge strategic mistake which is in a sense i think we people who believe in privacy have ended up i think making a huge strategic mistake which may well be controversial in this room and beyond um human beings aren't built like that most human beings the vast proportion of music they want to share information we're sitting all here sharing information between us all the time i want to be able to say yes and no but not just no privacy allows you to say no very well and of course the people who've now stepped into that space are apple and google and said we'll protect your privacy for you and the vast proportion of people believe them so again that's a huge another privacy challenge we know why it's important privacy isn't the way to achieve it you end up with something which i think is data ownership and data control and i think when you start saying that to people then people feel okay right that's something i can work with i can share when i want to share and i can say no when i want to say no on my terms in my you know my data my wallet my keys like it sure will be in the same place yeah thank you and uh we all know kind of gdpr is a i would say uh colossal failure because how many of you guys have like since gdpr launched you go to websites accept cookie you just accept it like accept all because you just want to get on with your browsing right how is that do anybody any good right the gdpr requirements so and uh so jp we know each other since you work at paypal and you join the decentralized world so congratulations and uh and what the heck is commercializing nft really mean how are you going to take an ft beyond gaming and collectibles well i think it comes down to how people view nfts at the core of it it's one ownership and ownership is super super critical and the other part of it it's frankly a content lego you can construct an nft into a number of different applications and i think you know there's a lot of excitement right now on gaming art collectibles but the truth is this really kind of sells short the entire capacity of the technology when we imagine a world at snickerdoodle of nfts you know being everything from coupons receipts licenses tickets music intellectual property academic records and the composability of this and we take the totality of nfts allows a number of applications where you know big enterprises can finally enter web3 in a way where ownership is frankly economical enough so you can extend this in mass to billions of people we're talking about a world where there will be tens of billions of nfts and the data behind all of those will allow the seamless and frictionless interactions between communities and consumers with large enterprises and at the heart of that those enterprises now have the capacity to frankly share the value of that data with consumers and consumers taking control of that is something we really believe is is critical um shift just to kind of build off what you said about ownership and control i think from the perspective of web3 firms our job is to empower the individual and this kind of notion of data stewardship where web3 firms can frankly offer the infrastructure and and framework for people to engage will allow mass adoption and that's the critical thing we have to design systems that are built for the 95 percent and not the 5 percent yes that means we're likely to have some compromise but if we move the whole you know ball down the field dramatically towards this vision of web 3 i think that's a net positive for the entirety of you know humans good answer and um you know we're thinking about data economy right today i think data called me i did some quick google before on stage so i'm fessing up and represents about 160 billion dollar total market and it's all about monetize and how to make money out of the data right and um so from you know from that perspective um what do you guys think you know in web three how what what the market's gonna look like and how we're gonna build you know the data economy sure uh i think a lot in the web two kind of data monetization and data markets ultimately is about advertising i feel of how to like build consumer profiles and just okay we want to collect uh data from their smart car and their phone and their buying and it ultimately kind of comes down to the web 2 model for things like google or facebook or instagram that constantly just comes down to advertising so if we're coming from this like privacy first approach but still care about data i think like thinking about ways of like what are we doing with this data that's not about building a consumer profile just to send ads but actually like building more constructive maybe opportunities to do things like join dowse even or different kind of tasks or different kind of like things that are more productive with this data that's being aggregated and so if you have control over of it and get to choose what markets or entities you share it to maybe you get to choose that it's not towards building a profile to receive ads but maybe for something else yeah and speaking of advertising right i think on cookies google announced recently they're going to disable third-party cookies on their browser and that's to ship's point that's really now you just have a first party cookie which is completely centralized and owned by google and uh you know and that's how advertising is going to make money there seems to be even increasingly so monopoly provider and and market so any any thoughts there yeah look advertising analysis is going through a huge existential crisis right now uh everything that they've built their entire life all the systems that they've built have been built premised on buying large third-party cookies and and obtaining data directly from consumers right they have been slightly shifting towards okay let's go to the website publishers themselves and get first party data as was known as but then they can't link all of that so they don't know from the website from like you know the guardian or from booking.com if that's the same person right it's really difficult to do it that way what you really want is for the person to turn up with that data vault and you go right you're you this is your data isn't that great that's wonderful here are the ads we want to serve right um they're they're literally panicking right now because not only are they being assaulted on the privacy side of things like facebook lost 10 billion dollars because uh people are who on ios 14.5 said i don't want to be tracked anymore um they're also facing the deletion of third-party cookies and google doesn't even know what it's going to replace it with it was like you know two months ago it was uh it was flocks and then they're like oh no we're gonna call it topics and it's still being sandboxed and the like time is ticking on you know a trillion plus dollar industry so this is the perfect moment this is the perfect moment for solutions like jonathan's mine and ryan's come along and go look if you want zero party data where people actually consent to sharing stuff themselves and it's held with them it's owned by them this is the moment and actually they're all pricking up their ears and going yeah probably is a better way to do it let's just jump the old cookies because they weren't even purpose-built for any of this stuff and let's start with something new and i would just add i think as we think about advertising on the previous points it's going to go from this macro perspective to the micro i mean gamification richard taylor who's written extensively about nudges i think working on how you gamify experiences both in real life and in meta and those types of metaverses is going to be extremely powerful to get people you know advertising but in a way that feels like a much more curated experience and as we think about you know say platforms like rallying what they're building with social creator tokens that requires a heavy amount of infrastructure to have delivery of of information let's be candid advertising can be annoying but it it solves a very real problem businesses wanting to get in front of consumers and having this process of discovering that shouldn't necessarily be feared or vilified but it should be known that individuals should be able to profit from it and frankly control it to make sure that they have the best possible experience with brands and other types of agencies that want to get in front of them and uh so so advertising is how uh so in my opinion there's two way to make money out of data right the two major way one is advertising clearly and the second one is actually trading and financial um it's institutional use case right um speaking from my own experience right we've been building for the past five years um transparency and insights into all the blockchain crypto trading related um data that's data is generally unchained with all the decentralized finance and d5 we are actually empowering um access democratizing access to liquidity being equity providers and tradings um you know through the blockchain technologies there as well do you guys have any thoughts from the financial use case there as well i'll add a quick thought and pass down i i think this is an important use case if we think about data data right now by most corporations and large enterprises is seen as an add value and i think if we think about this over the course of the next five to ten years at least at snickerdoodle we believe that data will go from being an add value to an actual asset and so if you're a large financial firm like blackstone you have you know terabytes of data across your portfolio companies now imagine a world where you can have that be an asset that is valued and more importantly if we think about the individual the individual who owns you know her his data this becomes an asset that is intrinsic to them andrew yang is walking around the conference he's he's talking to people trying to to raise money for his web 3 dow for lobbying but he spoke about this freedom dividend in the 2020 campaign and we believe that an individual's data you know is very similar what he talked about except you can devise systems from a private sector without taxes so that people can basically get ubi from their data and that's going to be a transformative way for people especially in developing economies to have an infusion of capital i'm sure um yeah so from a location point of view uh at phone we have a lot of thoughts of how that may impact financial markets today in financial markets you have all these things like indexes that look at kind of different kind of commodities so we've always kind of imagined that these location proofs are only the first step and what ultimately what could be unlocked are spatial markets or what we call a spatial index uh so we kind of would imagine that as a cross between a bloomberg terminal and a google maps where if you have like interoperable data and these data markets you could kind of visualize new kinds of financial markets maybe that's how much traffic a coffee shop is getting in a building and how much energy offset that building is generating and maybe how many cars are passing by in a way that's like visual so new ways to have financial markets that are interoperable taking real world data that have location aspects and then kind of being able to make new forms of value decisions of uh maybe what should come next in those locations so we have 10 minutes left let me let me ask you this if the audience here walk away today from today's panel remember one thing about what you do and what you're working on and the value you're bringing to the web3 world what would that be i'm going right you want to all right uh we're working on the future of positioning navigation and timing to offer new location services for web3 that work independent of gps um i would say this so we're building out uh and it's been that sort of a dream of many uh technologies to build this kind of thing and i think it's only been possible very recently uh it's a personal data fall so in the ecosystem you discover a bunch of data unions you go great i'll join this this and this uh data flows into your vault you keep it in your vault it's also the place where it's your crypto wallet right so now you're controlling your vault with your keys for your wallet and your data that's really convenient because then you can sign in with ethereum and suddenly you're self sovereign uh you have self children payments and identity right and you can share your data with whoever you want or not right so if you want your ads to be served to you and be more refined because it's based on the data in your vault great switch it on if not switch it off you get random ads right uh whatever it might be so if you again you know you go to your garage and you're like good i've already got like my car data stored in my data vault brilliant i want my mechanic to know what's wrong with my car tell me before it breaks down please right i'll share it with him or her right brilliant that's that's what we're building out and that's i think the future that i i certainly want to see it's damn more convenient and it gives me a hell of a lot more control i mean i would say beyond sneaker tools being the tastiest cookies out there we believe in a sticker was building a privacy protocol that's focused on you know a multi-chain vision of how data infrastructure will live on web3 and the core of that is the infrastructure for the individual to own control and monetize their data and this is going to be an incredibly powerful tool set that when built out to its full potential will enable everything from ubi with individual data to control uh and monetization to allow people to be truly self-sovereign and take you know what will be the most important commodity of this century you know into their own possession excellent well if anything want to remember me and amber data i think i will talk about what why we call our company amber data and it's really from a podcast by nick zappo and he talked about blockchain as a fly trapped in ember and you can see it it's immutable but you can't touch it right and it's really hard to measure it and analyzing it so that's why our mission emulator is we're bringing transparency into the whole crypto asset data economy so you can have easy access to the data and build applications and tradings on top of it so i was going to add one other thing um which is um this is a really you know we're talking about sort of web 2 having all the data and web 3 how do we kind of pull it into there there's various mechanisms to do that but the another mechanism is through policy and legislation so confession i was like a big policy nerd and uh and what's coming out of europe so the first wave of stuff that came out of europe was gdpr and it's all privacy stuff right copied by california uh with cc ccpa yeah a terrible acronym could never remember um and uh what's now dropping is is two things the first is that'll be published next week the data act which i got a leaked view of and what it says is and this is great for you ryan if you don't already know uh it's all iot objects will have to have data portability in real time built in by design so that means your smart speakers your smart watches your car all of this stuff will just have to add a click of a button you'll be able to if you own that object port it to anywhere else you want to right so that's going to open up a huge amount of innovation in that field and then the other piece is from um it's called the digital markets act and that's dropping that should be in law next month and uh it'll be enacted next year october so there's a deadline to remember the walls are coming down on the silos for gafam uh the digital microsoft says any user of those platforms will be able to port their data out of google microsoft apple facebook etc in real time you can already put it out with a file and wait 30 days in an email but now it will be updated to real time that's the end of google silo that's the end of i mean i don't know how to pull facebook's data out because it's so relational to facebook but that's also the end of apple and amazon's like data silos that's it like for everyone in europe anyway so let's see if the us then copies it um thank you extra pointer thank you so oh i want to thank my ryan chev and jp for participating today i enjoy chatting with you guys thank you thank you [Applause] we have about five minutes for questions if anyone has any for the panel hey this is michelle i have a question about consent um and consent in terms of privacy data dignity which is identity and also um security and i just feel like those are interrelated