Crypto is breaking the Google-Amazon-Apple monopoly on user data
Crypto is breaking the Google-Amazon-Apple monopoly on user data
Blockchain is undermining Big Tech companies and cloud providers, particularly when it comes to the Internet of Things.
For decades, banks and insurance firms employed the same mostly static but highly profitable and centralized business models. Also for decades, Big Tech firms such as Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Google have monopolized user data for their profit. However, blockchain projects could significantly challenge Big Tech’s grip on user data.
In 2015, the future of money was at the forefront of financial experts’ minds at the World Economic Forum in Davos. There, they started to seriously focus on the challenges presented by the rise of Bitcoin digital assets and fintech. The world of finance began to realize that new technologies were upending everything in the sector, from savings to trading to making payments and cross-border and peer-to-peer transactions.
Then in the summer of 2020 came the decentralized finance (DeFi) renaissance. After a couple of years of seeing an extraordinary rise in this new concept, the machine economy started to take center stage and concern over who should own the world’s new greatest commodity, data.
Thanks to blockchain, we have DeFi, SocialFi, GameFi and a new emerging asset category: machine financialization (MachineFi), or the decentralized machine economy. It enables the owners of the billions of internet-connected devices worldwide to monetize them and developers to build decentralized applications (DApps) that draw device data for monetization.
Big Tech has built trillion-dollar empires selling user data. Blockchain can change that by democratizing the data and machine economy.
Historically, machine economies have failed to garner traction due to the infrastructure and capital requirements needed to operationalize them. Blockchain changes that by providing users, businesses and developers with an end-to-end solution to distribute, orchestrate and monetize large numbers of smart devices as part of a unified machine network.
There are currently more than 50 blockchain projects related to the Internet of Things (IoT). There are also several traditional tech companies — such as IBM, Azure, Samsung, Apple, Google and Amazon — that are combining IoT and blockchain to power the burgeoning machine economy.