Why Regulation Will Decentralize Data - Shiv Malik

talk about how decentralization our regulation is going to force the decentralization of data is shiv malik one of my favorite writers as it turns out he's a novelist please check him out on amazon.com which is unfortunately a very centralized bookstore among other things uh and uh at streamer which is a remarkable company ship why don't you give us a uh preview of your book maybe before you get into your uh panel here david if you're speaking i can't hear you you're a mute uh i'm just going on you can you hear me now yeah okay i'll let you take it from here great uh hey um and by the way david's gone but i was gonna say to you i really love your like chair it's like a crazy evil chair you need like a cat to like finish off the look um so yeah look uh i'm chef malek uh and it's so great to be back like you know for third year in a row uh sadly obviously not in the sports castle itself for john p and the team um mr creativity the stalls just like you know checking out what's going on uh the polka party in the arts uh the arts hotel um i mean maybe not the you know the fettered toilets after 24 hours of a hackathon but you know anyway miss you guys and um so anyway i'm here to talk about why regulation will decentralize data so um actually first i want to start by stepping back for a second to talk about sort of data in web 3 if you want um and how it fits into the web3 space um and in this space we've actually created some as we know very cool infrastructure right uh and very cool tools uh bitcoin's given us money uh ethereum have given us contracts obviously i'm simplifying here um uni swap camp compound rv and the like uh sushi swap uh don't leave them out uh they've given us you know d5 uh and you know what's the next big thing well you know assets right as it's the next um and in fact this is kind of well trammel route in economic history uh assets always comes next uh and it's actually weird because you'd think that assets would come before financialization right uh having the things before speculating on the things you have but no uh and a little aside like the anthropologist and uh expert in the history of money the late david graber he actually made that point uh like you know go back to the babylonians and it was always strange that finance should become should come before the assets uh he didn't know why and if he doesn't know why i don't know why uh and i guess no one knows why it's just the way that it was uh humans seem to like experimenting with financialization of money before getting stuck in with the assets so as to secure us aside um but assets you know they're they're here right uh to an extent uh nfts projects like uh nba top shot um uh where i even if i've got this right like you know they're taking video reels and tokenizing them i mean i don't play baseball uh baseball basketball c i don't play baseball either from the uk but um you know if i've understood that correctly then that's what they're doing and that's pretty cool and then there's art and that you know is a weird picture of you know obviously vitalik uh dressed as a harlequin uh and that sold for 140 000 right it's got to be worth something um and then of course we have stos right they've been stymied uh by by regulation in fact of all things uh the the the german project newfound um has stalled just because of that that's what they said um but you've got other projects like materium finances project and tokenize other physical assets like that um but you know there's one really obvious asset right to bring into the web through space data right it's already digitally native and it's worth hundreds of billions nay trillions of dollars right and you've got streamer ocean chain link we're all working to bring data uh into into the web3 space right as an asset and uh and trent mcconaughey from promotion has got this phrase data is now an asset class and he's very right about that i mean other people have said that too and and then they're all right but but uh problem is web3 doesn't have much of its uh much in the way of its own native data right um it's you know mainly just prices and and sort of chain analytics and uh and sort of not really what data buyers out there right what they want the guys who actually have the cash the most valuable stuff is actually the data that's in web 2. i mean maybe i don't think any of this is particularly surprising right but you need to be able to port that data from web 2 into web3 right so the question is how do we do that so you've got this great asset class um data how do you get it from web 2 into web3 um well what does web3 have to offer web 2 in this respect right how do you create that bridge and suck data into the space the crypto space so what can we offer well surprise surprise i think the answer is pretty simple well we've got money contracts and finance all the things we've already built right and you can imagine sort of contracts in finance in terms of data um if you look at what the ocean project is doing some really radical stuff on this front it's really worth checking that out what they're doing with liquidity pools and tokenizing data assets but you know you might want to just go back to that simplest use case money right sounds really simple uh share your data and we'll give you a cut of the overall wealth right of the overall rewards and you end up with these things called data cops or data unions it's a really very simple proposition in a sense um and we've got this share and earned model it's already taking off right uh geodb you might have heard of them they're an app now i think with 200 000 users um doing uh geolocation data uh you've got tap my data which actually just had a token sale on balancer in december but actually you know not necessarily crypto native uh to start with and you've got swash who actually build on streamer and uh and are crypto native and uh and have that kind of model uh as well um but none of this is particularly easy to to build right uh so the proposition might sound simple but actually the back end is a really tough nut to crack uh and i know that because i've been working with these projects um uh swash and and others um uh for a long while now and everyone's having problems um so i mean this is as i said what streamers have been doing we've been building out basically generic back-end infrastructure for these data unions and data cops and um i'm not going to go into the complexities of that i've talked about that actually last year but um if you want to get a feel for it it looks a bit like this right there's a lot of moving parts and there's money and data all over the place and you know it's complicated um you just have to trust me on that one if you don't believe it but i'm happy to talk your ear off if you don't uh about how complicated it really is um and it stretches the kind of web 3's tooling that we have and infrastructure to its limit which is great so we've built outside of the bridge from web 3 to web 2 if you want we've got our proposition we've got our apps uh the consumer facing um and that's great because it's bringing people into the space and they're getting paid in crypto so they have to kyc you have to do any of that they don't have to invest they just get money crypto for doing the things that they would otherwise do which is beautiful that's just beautiful right um and we're getting there right and the infrastructure's there and we're getting there the problem is the web 2 data right is controlled and protected by silos right and data is actually you know perhaps the most privately controlled asset class around even though much of the evident raw data is actually generated by ordinary people like you and me it's siloed like right uh and those silos are enforced with web 2 tools right not with code not with code but with law right property law in particular so how do you get interoperability with legal protection right like this like from you know these people have a lot of money a lot of lawyers uh and um and actually they have the law very much on their side at the moment um it's not by writing a program integration right because if it was code it was web three rules you'd be like hey we'll just create a something that would make stuff interoperable it'd be great just write some code um in web 2 when you have laws doing the protection it's by introducing new regulation right so we need the regulators to introduce new laws to complete that bridge and actually so for the last year um during pandemic no better time uh that's what me and a bunch of other guys at my data global and radical exchange uh spent most of that lockdown doing uh getting on calls with regulators uh which is actually a little bit more fun than you think it would be uh and guess what right they well the eu not all global regulators right just the eu they they did it they they finally did it so what do they do well um they've now created three big pieces of legislation in europe which all got released at the back end of last year so late november december and uh we only need to actually focus on two of them here and that's what i'm going to do but um those two acts that we're focusing on are the data governance act and the digital markets act the dga and the dma because everyone loves a good acronym um and i think everyone in this space should know what's happening with those two acts and what they mean because the two pieces of legislation should complete that bridge uh that unfinished bridge to web 2 data and turn it into a web 3 asset thereby decentralizing data or in the very least helping to distribute the power over that data like never before okay so let me just i'm just going to check the comments uh not because i'm like narcissistic um i'm just making sure everyone can hear me right it's all good great yeah right um so uh the first of these acts right is the digital governance act uh the data governance act sorry and um what it what it does is basically it uh it establishes these new organizations data intermediary intermediaries or data cooperatives or data unions and they give them legal standing and recognition right that's a big deal obviously because if you don't have legal standing it's very difficult to kind of garner trust and it's a big step forward in that regard and they also set up these uh they ensure that these organizations should have fiduciary duties right a kind of legal responsibility to their members to the people who actually create the data um and that aligns interests and that's also really key right so you know it's not foolproof it's certainly not written in code but you can also write it into code in certain ways and that's what we've been working on in streamr and swash and the like um that you can't cheat your members but it'll never be foolproof of course while people are still paying in fiat in some way or another those data buyers so all of this is very useful and uh it'll make them the kind of go-to organization if you want for sources of personal data but um uh you know some of the eu will have sort of legally recognized bodies who can be trusted by the mainstream to handle that data on behalf of ordinary ordinary people and that is just awesome okay what's the second piece of the legislation well it's the digital markets act and this piece of legislation is slowly uh solely directed at regulating gatekeepers right the big platform operators with significant troll over areas of business and end users right so this is your youtubes and your facebooks and your itunes and amazon's for sure we don't actually know who else might fall into this category uh uh for now but we definitely know it's those lot uh for for you know to start with um and actually you can ignore most of the act uh for the purposes um i think of of thinking about data and web3 uh except for this small provision article six uh section h and i i did the work people um and it says this which is uh it should also be ensured that business users and end users can port that data in real time effectively uh such as for example through high quality application programming interfaces uh aka apis people so it's access to real-time portability rights finally uh no more gdpr with like portability where you have to like email and it's like 30 days it's like two clicks and that's it the real-time stream of information is coming straight from the api to to your api right presumably um if the user consents and that is huge absolutely huge um and actually later on it specifically mandates third parties to be able to utilize those rights on behalf of the consumers too right so that is awesome uh so to submit if you want this legislation if passed as is right it's still draft legislation um would give legal standing to daily unions and cooperatives and make them the trusted go-to organizations for handling people's data and so now we'd have the rough organizational form to handle that data and if they can get that consent from the individuals right through presumably some kind of incentivization thing right money uh then they can access their real those real-time streams of information from those big platform accounts right so no more google silos people that's a big thing it's a big deal and it's a huge victory if it passes so you know there's going to be pitfalls no doubt but we can see how then you kind of end up decentralizing data right really exciting um you got your web3 tools and your money right you've got your general tooling and your back-end infrastructure coming from streamer ocean chain link right and then you've got your legislation add it all up and you get dinner as a web 3 asset i work really hard on that by the way that graphic center graphics so you know hey um it's a really huge move and i would expect that in a few years time i think the decentralized data space will be as big as uh defy um i don't doubt it look that's me um i think we've got a few more minutes if to answer questions or the like or maybe david's got a few things he wants to ask me i don't know so i i guess i'll ask you one or two questions here why not uh tell me shiv um you know what's surprising you the most about the data conversation in 2021 we've seen uh people not trusting uh the mainstream media you know quite a lot what about data on the internet what about web3 data how's the conversation shifted you know i mean amongst legislators it moved really fast at the end of like last year basically i mean maybe i'll give you that picture first um yeah i mean i remember going to the like the only place i flew to last year um post lockdown and kind of march was was berlin in september for this conference um with a bunch of kind of regulators and policy makers because that's the fun time i have uh and they were all just like super incensed raring to go they realized they'd made some real big screw-ups with gdpr they'd put too much weight on and people might not want to hear this they put far too much weight on privacy doing a lot of the like heavy lifting when it came down to kind of competition law right um there's this weird looking back it's kind of weird but there's this thing like oh you know what like if we just make privacy the thing then you know we'll have competition right uh and somehow we'll be able to challenge facebook and google's monopolies and stuff of course you know now it doesn't sound very sensical when you kind of say it like that but um that's what people believed at the time and they kind of frustrated that it didn't work out right especially the kind of really lame portability rules which to be fair would devise in 2011 when email was you know still like the hot thing well maybe not but you know what i mean uh and people hadn't really heard of certainly not legislators heard of api and real-time rights so that's certainly changed just vastly uh and that's it it's done it's sealed people want to tackle and you can see that conversation in the u.s as well it's a bit more heated especially around section 230 um but no one likes the the big guys anymore um and that's that's the big conversational change all right well i'm sure we're going to see a lot more about that uh the rest of this year that section 230 conversation is just beginning and it's getting a lot of attention today well everyone we've got another fantastic uh talk coming up really really soon thank you shiv so much for that conversation