Onboarding Web2 to Web3 via Data Unions - Panel

so uh also hi to everyone watching in the live stream um today we're going to be talking about onboarding web 2 to web 3 via data unions and my name is melina ronstadt i'm the co-founder of the data union dao and first of all let me introduce you my fellow panelists so first of all we have here matthew rossi he is my fellow co-founder at the data union dao and also the director of product at polygon then we have keith he is the co-founder of republic dell which is leveraging the data union framework we're providing so looking forward to hear more on that and then we have two of these gentlemen from demo and we have jeff and rob who are both co-founders at demo which is another data union leveraging the abilities of data monetization in web 3. so um before we're going to dive into things i can maybe give you a quick overview of what data units are and how people can use data unions to own their own data in the decentralized web so traditionally we don't have control over our own data we know that facebook and google are monetizing our data and that there's very little opportunity for people to actually change that and to intervene with that and the sdk that the data union dial is providing basically tries to tackle that by introducing new models of data ownership into the web3 ecosystem and the premise here is basically that we're thinking that everyone has data but not everyone has crypto and this is how we think we can get the next billion users into the space so um maybe first of all let's hear from the guys from demo down there how they're leveraging the data union sdk and how exactly that interacts with what demo is so a little bit of a background i come from the connected car space and the self-driving car space um spent a lot of time building solutions that send data to palantir and after watching it for 10 years decided something was wrong and found found out about streamr and you know they provide a lot of the core functionality that we need to allow someone to monetize their car's information which is usually the second biggest purchase anyone makes and um that's pretty much it yeah yeah cool um and maybe keith you can also tell us exactly what republic dao is and how that interacts with the idea of data unions uh yeah republic is a way for users to collect and control their own personal data um i think we all have different takes on it uh republics is kind of a comprehensive utopian idea where you know whatever google is doing to you you can do for yourself where you get to collect all the data that everyone's making money off of and you get to see it first you get to control it and then you get to decide uh if and how it is shared so um and it's early days but we're using the daily data union framework uh to handle a lot of the heavy lifting as far as securely sharing and also distributing data back to the data providers which is a thorny mess that the data union sdk takes care of and if i understand that correctly the republic app is already available so people can already download that today and actually join that data union and start monetizing their data yep that's right uh play store for android and the app store cool amazing um rob maybe you also want to tell us a bit more how people can get started with demo and how to interact with it yeah so we're a little bit earlier stage but you can connect your car right now if it's a newer model and you have a and you have a software connection for your vehicle at app.demo.zone coming out with the web app soon and we have a device that is on sale it's currently sold out but we're going to reopen the store soon that allows you to connect older vehicles cool that's really awesome and how do you guys think that data unions can be instrumental in getting web 2 in general the web 2 crowd onto the decentralized web that question basically goes to all of you who wants to ever go first i can i can start on that so the kind of common theme here is that we want users to own their data but if they own the data and all they can really do is give it back to a facebook or google it's not really enough and data unions kind of allow users who control our data to uh kind of collectively negotiate how that data is used and it gives more power to the user so again we're our whole thing the core principle with demo is ownership and having our users be the owners and being aligned with the platform and the data union kind of makes that possible without it be a huge missing piece yeah and i would say the the mental models for web 2 users might not be fully there as far as like what's coming their way to give them autonomy in sharing and controlling their data and i think the data union framework allows you to use analogies like okay this is basically the google infrastructure that they have except that's personalized to you internally where you can do the collection you can do the brokering you can do the sale you can do the control you can do the licensing and that is very difficult to do and so the data union framework kind of takes care of that and i think the way we think about that is uh more generally sort of like a quick start guide so um moving from web to web 3 looks scary and hard if you haven't already been in the space and we know like the web 3 devs are like they're an easy target right they kind of get it and and when we think about the dow it's not only just technology but also ecosystem and mentors and all other sorts of support that we can sort of layer on um so that we can make that transition easier for teams um yeah so that's really what it's about from from my perspective anyway from a co-founder mingmer yeah and um yeah i would be interested in hearing from you because you've been working in the automobile industry for the last 10 years and you've been trying to educate automakers about the ability and the possibilities of web3 and now it's actually the other way around that these companies are starting to approach you guys so how do you see sort of the on-ramp for these web 2 companies into the web 3 space that's a very good question um so we look we live in what i like to call a [Music] survey one's capitalism and the difference between capitals and surveillance capitalism is you not only provide the data for product improvement but it's used against you to drive your behavior the car companies are very behind in terms of how quickly they move but what it gives us a lot of room because they also know there's something kind of wrong with the current model right they know that they're signing up their customers and selling their data behind the back and eventually they know the chicken's going to kind of come home to roost right which is you know driving a lot of conversations that we've had to integrate this into a actual vehicle where you know it doesn't have to be weird anymore where you're buying a car and also selling your entire life cool yeah definitely um keith i'm also curious to hear from you what sort of inspired you to start republic because you have a background in journalism and you've been working for wired which probably covers a lot of story around like how data is being mistreated and mismanaged so um was that like an impetus for you to get started with republic uh yeah definitely that was kind of formative to my like tech utopian ideals and uh i finally was in a position to make those materially real and i think if we're talking about web 2 to web 3 i've noticed like a few salient points that a lot of people don't grasp where even people within the space are maybe putting a guesstimate on what user data might be and i've heard even like 50 to 60 a year or something and i i personally believe that to be almost ubi levels like in today's currency probably over a thousand dollars a month and if it's fully inefficient market and everything is being shared as its uh as its users permit so um it's those sorts of things that uh kind of drove me to i'm like these numbers are way too low and i think that's kind of indicative of the overall perception of the of the space and that's something we definitely need to get through to the web 2 users yeah i think it's going to be really interesting to see how much money at the end of the day these web twos or two users can make by like selling their data and monetizing it do you guys at demo already have like some ideas of like how valuable that data is eventually going to be or uh there is so to i guess let everybody know there's already two companies that are in the space for the auto oems their names are autonomous and they pay about five dollars a month to the oem for your data right uh so kind of the bar starts there i think the it's gonna go much higher once we see self-driving vehicles because they have video data which can be used for a lot more use cases yeah yeah i think it's also important to oh sorry robin i was going to say and that's that's very siloed it's it's hard you can't you know develop applications on top of we join autonomous data the same way that you'll build on top of ours so hopefully the more open platform makes that data more valuable and then also there's there's more than just the data there's the connectivity to the vehicles as well and vehicles will increasingly and just devices generally and iot networks will communicate with each other send payments to each other there will be kind of a read and write so really it could go quite a bit higher in terms of the value on these vehicles yeah and just to like wrap that up right um what we're going to what i think we're going to find is that people that are willing to share one kind of data set are also going to be very bullish to share other kinds of data sets so it's not about just being in one union it's once you've sort of entered the ecosystem as an end user you're like oh wow i can share data with demo i can put that in my car i can share data with republic um i can join other data unions as they arrive and that's that's how we envision our sort of flywheel is every new data union in brings along with it a new participant pool from their vertical but then those people get to see the sort of breadth of all the other projects and go great now i can join two three things and now you really can start to uh make some real uh real money at the end of the day we hope right um yeah so i think that's great yeah i think i'm also curious to hear from all of you guys how you kind of see the role of data unions in the bigger web 3 picture because we just had to talk about defy and onboarding more people into d5 and i think data unions can be another tool to really get like a lot more people into crypto and um yeah i'm just curious to hear your thoughts on that uh i was thinking about this earlier and the data union framework can always be thought of as the way that a token creates a community around it so does um a a shared data set or data model among people and so it's very um it's community building and it's very like a web three forward and i think there's a lot of um similarities between cryptocurrencies and properly encrypted data uh as far as like stacking different uh data types and um almost not staking but uh putting them in certain pools to to provide value to other people and so that's maybe a mental model we can leverage as people uh come in for for crypto and d5 and then kind of understand how uh data moves in a similar way where the mechanics are similar the way we think about it is everybody has data not everybody has crypto and i think there's a lot of reasons why people get into it but i think a very simple one is you know i want to own more of my data and control where it goes i think that's a very easy pitch to an average person that may not be into trading for example right and real quick i think the one key component of that is the data union makes clear that uh like in my experience the average person doesn't understand the value of their individual data um and it's true that their individual data is not worth much right like if they could actually approach a seller it wouldn't make sense but the data union is that value added it's like yours with other people's is actually what what the product is yeah maybe matthew you want to expand a bit on that point in terms of how the aggregation of data makes it valuable versus like the individual data points are actually not that valuable at all yeah right i mean as soon as you start rolling things up and and we get bigger and bigger numbers then um all the team's ability to sort of monetize that to larger and larger clients um goes up which means all the people that are contributing uh you know start to see more and more rev shared out um and again i think that's when we think about the growing the ecosystem and that flywheel of new projects spawns like brings more eyeballs more eyeballs bring uh more joiners into data unions more more data gets shared and and then we keep pumping that back into the ecosystem right um yeah and that's why we're very excited um about our dow to dao partnership uh with polygon um and we think that will bring a new crop of developers and eyeballs to the project and there'll be some other opportunities there that both daos are um sort of kind of like negotiating right now um but uh yeah but i'm happy to be able to announce that and i think that's gonna be beneficial to all the existing teams um and we're going to get some like great new projects out of that and kind of keep continuing to like grow the ecosystem so that's like super exciting as well yes definitely i'm also really excited about that um yeah maybe um so if we look at this growing ecosystem and if we think okay now we have like a handful of builders and dows in our ecosystem that are all kind of creating these new data unions we have maybe half a million users in total by now and how do you all think this is really going to go forward in the next five or 10 years like do you think it's going to be normal to be part of a data union or is this going to remain a niche thing go ahead i think it's what's clear is that that will be part of the the fabric and the infrastructure of people every everybody's daily life but whether they realize that or not i'm i'm not quite sure like how how like explicit it needs to be but this is like a kind of part of that elemental infrastructure of if we are headed to utopia rather than dystopia this is like something that needs to be there as a foundation and um you know whether you know my parents need to know what data unions are or whether they just need to know that their data is like safe and secure and um only shared in the ways that they want i think you know that's an open question i think the bar is pretty low because with you know with facebook i give them my data so they can make me angry and buy things i don't need so people are willing to offer up so much uh with someone that's where their incentives are not aligned where their data you know is subject to getting leaked all the time there's no transparency when they have the opportunity to monetize their data with a group that is aligned that they can participate in it's transparent certainly seems like something that will get popular so long as they can be functional and effective any thoughts from you i certainly i mean um yeah i totally agree i mean i i feel like this will be much more the norm you know that far out uh i think we will see um people that will join many many data unions and i think um when the data union itself thinks about tooling to provide to builders i think about interoperability and maybe a wallet um and uh really thinking about end user experience like what's it gonna be like if i am in seven different data unions and um i'm using all those apps and i'm collecting um all of these tokens like then what can i do with it and then we can take that to the like the next level and i think you're right to think about obstruction too like exactly like most people um have a hard time getting into crypto because it's still high friction to do that and i think a lot of your apps are a much lower friction and it's like i share this thing i start earning um and then we can start layering on the sort of crypto use cases after that i think it's an easy way in though and i think that's why we're excited about like a new on-ramp to get people into the space yeah definitely and what do you think are some use cases for data units so now we have like they're both like around more personal data use cases demo and republic um but i think there's probably a lot more also when it comes to iot devices for example or where do you think this could really take off the concept oh well i i think every vertical is ripe for data unions if you have uh if you are a b2c app um or a beta device app um you could be a data union it's really about um kind of shifting that mental model and thinking about it as a ecosystem um and growing an economy um then i i yeah and that's what we're here to do is to kind of help with those transitions right uh yeah one use case i'm actually really excited about is um like refi uh there's a lot of dows trying to buy real estate in order to preserve it and and restore it and part of that is like an auditing process and you're gonna need you know whether it's cameras or drones or sensors on on the property those are all uh if those are valuable data streams that can be another revenue source for those refi pro or restoration projects and carbon sequestrations yeah i think automotive data of course you do the other one that we've seen you know was one of the earliest crypto use cases was uh you know web traffic browser data braves basic attention token some other things have come after that obviously and so that's obviously a very likely one as well and um yeah maybe to wrap things up so you guys actually just raised 9 million congrats to that to build out demo and maybe you can just tell me what's what's going to happen next well we already launched the ability for you to add your car today via software connection uh that's the first thing we're doing we have a hardware device that plugs into the car that actually puts a wallet in the car which we have a lot of future use cases for but the simple version is you use that to collect your data and send it to the data union and there's a lot more real-world kind of digital infrastructure built around that uh that's coming later but at a high level we're um we're shipping a lot and uh making sure that it's a good experience for the users yeah the major priority is to connect as many cars as we can it's going to be relatively centralized to start with a heavy emphasis on the progressive decentralization we want to get a token in the hands of the community soon so they can control the network and kind of get bought in early on as we continue to take you know data streams that are flow over you know aws or something else and get them flowing over web3 rails so that people can build on top of that very cool and what about you keith what's next for republic uh well we're focused on community building obviously uh this doesn't work unless um you know it's it's widely adopted and we've kind of set the stage and the road map to be i mean this really doesn't work in a web 2 world like before web 3 it was i was researching co-ops and like shared ownership but really you can't have the sort of universal adoption for the kind of data sets are going to be the most valuable without users owning owning the network and deciding what happens with it and driving the software which is all open source and so it really needs to be transparent and so we're just kind of grinding and iterating on that and we're in it for the long haul so be like short on short term updates and uh but when we do it'll be significant awesome yeah sounds very exciting cool um i think we have question for for a time for one audience question over there from a technical perspective like these smart contracts that operate data unions they're basically efficient splitting contracts right like they make it so you can pay out data union members with a single transaction and that's basically all they are at this point like what do you think are the next set of features for smart contracts for data unions um yep so uh yeah i think or like i said like i think not so much about the smart contract specifically but about just other tooling like we we sort of approach it from wanting the teams to they've they're in a vertical they they know their audience and who they're marketing to and they've got their own road maps that are core and and that's the value that they're bringing where we're trying to be just generic tooling infrastructure that any data union would be able to leverage and then thinking about how to tie the whole ecosystem together at the end we already have um one data union buying data from another data union at value adding on top of it and then re-monetizing that data set right so we we think about interoperability um we think about end user experience i'm in like a bunch of unions and now i want to see my rolled up earnings and things like that um so anywhere we can bring efficiency of the ecosystem that'll be on our technology roadmap we do have this concept of a proof of trust contract that we're thinking about and that would provide all data unions an ability to sort of stake value into that contract it would be governed by the dow and that would be our sort of like slashing mechanism if they're if they move away from the principles um of you know good data stewardship and and we share value back to our ecosystem things like that um so these are kinds of things that are sort of high on our list of features thanks thank you