Unlocking new "x to earn" use cases with Data Unions

Transcript

people have joined a data union and only or four people perfect and only one person has played uh played play to earn okay cool all right we can start great awesome yeah so today i'm going to be talking about unlocking new x to earn use cases via data unions and i think as this little sample here has shown which is quite interesting i mean like usually uh play to earn is like the really popular use case everyone seems to be talking about whereas data unions are not that well known so far i would assume so um and i would assume that you all know what play to earn is but let me just revise it anyways basically you play a game and you get paid for that whereas

with data unions let's have a look at the definition so basically joining a data union means that you crowdsource your data together with other users and like that you can then also crowd sell your data so instead of google and facebook selling your data you have control over your own data and therefore you can get crypto in return for your data and i think the reason why we need better control over our data is because really web 2 is completely broken and whether that is like companies like google and facebook which continuously run into privacy scandals and which continuously have to pay big fines over running into these

scandals which actually still doesn't really help the users because we don't see that money when facebook now they have to pay 90 uh million dollars for a fine but that doesn't mean anything for the users actually right and then also recently there was news that coinbase has been selling user data to ice the u.s immigrations uh and customs enforcement agency which i think is also kind of up that they're doing this also without the consent of their users um and i think web 3 has a different spin to that so what i'm not saying is that we should now all crowdsource our data from like dexes and sell that to ice as well but there is definitely an opportunity here how we can crowdsource our data

and create more of a win-win-win data economy instead of the approach that we have in web 2 where the winner takes it all so in that model in the web 3 model we can incentivize participation through token economics through creating game theoretical approaches that make it a lot more interesting for people to actually crowdsource their data and that doesn't necessarily only go for data sets that already exist like your browsing history or what you're doing on facebook but that also could mean sharing and monetizing medical data and creating new incentives to share these new data sets so the question i always get then is

well that sounds all great but what's the value of my data which basically translates to how much money do i make if i sell my data because at the end of the day this is all about incentives and if you don't get enough money then probably none of us would be bothered to join a data union and i think the ideas of like how much money you can actually make with your data they really divert so benedict evans who's a former a16z partner and now basically just influencer i guess um he uh put out this tweet recently where he's saying that per user facebook is making 99 cents per quarter so that we would mean that within one year if they

would give you all that money they're making on you you would only make four dollars which is really not a lot of money at all um but then you know that could be disputed as well and maybe if you think about well you sell your facebook data you sell your google data you sell your netflix data you sell your amazon data maybe then it might amount to a more attractive amount um then on the other hand side we have a former presidential candidate andrew yang who is also the initiate the initiator of the data dividend initiative and the data dividend is basically the idea to have sort of like a ubi so a universal basic income that is driven by the value we're all

creating online so this approach is more of a taxation approach mostly because that would mean taxing big tech companies in the us and then paying that money to u.s citizens but we're here in paris and france today i don't know about you guys i'm not american so i wouldn't get any money for my data in that case but i think this idea is quite interesting nonetheless to explore however also one of the pitfalls here is that it doesn't create any incentives to tap into data that has been untapped so far and then of course the play to earn spiel and i think that's a really interesting one especially if we look at this one right here from eighty dollars daily

four dollars now but actually this is really good in comparison to getting four dollars per year for your facebook data um so just in comparison when it comes to the numbers game even though the market is really down in the x to earn realm you can still make a little bit more than what you could make right now by joining a data union um that being said i think the problem with extern as it functions right now is that the token economics and the incentive models are maybe rather a ponzi don't kill me for saying this please but i think the problem is really that you're actually not creating any visible value there is no buyer for this activity so there is the only market that is being created is

the market for the token and that market is driven by speculation and not because anyone's creating any value i think the same thing goes for step in um i saw a tweet the other day from a guy who had bought a step in nft for 8 11 k and now he has to walk every day 11 kilometers just to break even on that nft which is really silly um and i think also to that question here can you get rich probably not um so yeah let's look at some data unions which right now also they're not going to make you rich but i think they kind of rather show the way in how we can have a more sustainable way of thinking about what play to earn or extern could be um

because here we're actually also including data's data buyers into the whole division so this example here is swash it's a browser plugin you can download that right now and they have around 200 000 downloads which probably makes them one of the biggest web 3 applications out there um and yeah you can get paid for your data in real time you can set a delay for your data so basically that means um you can set a five minute delay for instance so if you would ever put in any more critical data which you don't want to monetize then you can exclude that um and you can also blacklist certain websites which you don't want to monetize at all and

yeah basically it looks a little bit like metamask when you download that and then you also have a wallet inside there and you get tokens for your um for your data and swash actually recently made the first sale of a data set um and so that means that there is actually a real market here with real interest and real value and real buyers and not just like a token that is being like speculated up and down um another cool example which i really like is demo and that is basically a drive to earn play and that one is kind of like a fitness tracker for your car and you can monetize the data for that so there are two different models they offer

one is a hardware device that you plug into your car and the other one is just an app and i cannot drive so i haven't tried it um but apparently it's super straightforward to just install the app and then connect that with your tesla or ev if you have and then it gathers metrics such as battery life or um sensory data from your car and um yeah with demo you can make right now up to ten dollars a month so i think this gets more into the territory where it actually becomes interesting in terms of the value that we are creating with this um yeah and i think here are a couple of other use cases i put down maybe there are some builders in the room who got

inspired by this talk now and who are interested in exploring this more and like what could be actually done with the framework so we have for example shop to earn sweat to earn drive to earn money or to earn degen to earn or browse to earn i think the degen to earn use case could be pretty cool so basically you could think about like a also a browser app a browser plugin that you install that you then activate every time you're using a dex for instance or you're doing like any yield farming or stuff like that and um then you could start monetizing that data on your own behalf um and also you know probably that data wouldn't be sold to ice because you would have a say in like where that data actually goes

um yeah and to these other use cases i mean the sweat to earn goes a lot into the step in direction but i think there is a lot of potential here also for different kind of healthcare apps that could be connected with data unions and that could enable people to monetize and share a lot of these data points um yeah so how to build a data union um there are a couple of different projects out there right now that are trying to push this idea of data unions into the world i'm the co-founder of the data union dao which is a spin-off from streamer so we're heavily relying on the streamers deck and we're also building on ethereum polygon and gnosis so basically the data goes through the

streamer network and then um the uh financial flows go through kenosis and polygon and ethereum mostly prognosis just because it's the cheapest solution to actually pull that off uh with the current gas costs still being down but still it will be a lot like just way too much to do that on mainnet on ethereum and yeah basically we offer an sdk and a set of smart contracts which you can leverage to build your own data union um and which makes the whole undertaking fairly easy and i think also the interesting use case here is that this really opens the door for um new business models for existing web 2 applications because they can basically just take their application and plug that into an existing um and plug that

into the data union framework so for example you have a sports app like a yoga app or a fitness app and then you plug that into the data union framework and then you can start monetizing um that data as a user and maybe at some point in the future um every app you're using which you have right now on your phone could have this little box and you just tick that box and you say like yes i would like to monetize my data and for some apps you're using you're like nah actually i don't want to monetize that data and i think that's completely okay as well so it shouldn't be this approach that you have to sell everything but users should have the option and users should also have yeah a share in the value they're creating um also shout out to the guys

from pool who are doing something very fairly similar to us um so they also offer a framework for creating data unions um yeah and then when it comes to selling the data that's quite an interesting problem as well right so we have these web three data marketplaces like ocean marketplace and streamer marketplace and then we have the traditional web 2 data marketplaces like databricks and snowflake and one of the problems here is though like i mean like i love decentralization and i love crypto but these decentralized data marketplaces are not really busy right now there are no buyers and the problem is i think in that case really if you want to sell eventually

these data sets you have to go where the buyers are so what we are considering in the case of the data union dao is to create integrations with data breaks and with snowflake aws data marketplace to actually sell the data over there um because it doesn't really make sense to like wait in these web 3 marketplaces if there are no buyers and i guess another problem here is also when it comes to payments probably your traditional data buyer is not going to be willing to like get some tokens and then install meta mask and they might want to have an invoice so um they would probably prefer this more traditional approach so i think it makes sense also at that stage to be realistic

about where this data eventually goes to and how people can eventually monetize it in a meaningful way and yeah all that being said um we are also tinkering on this concept that we are calling proof of trust and the idea behind that is basically that we want to protect the users of the data union to really avoid any kind of situations where the data is being sold against their own will and that all works perfectly fine as long as we're in this enclosed web 3 ecosystem because we have smart contracts and they enforce that the revenue is being shared accordingly with the users in a fair and equitable way but once the data is being sold on a web 2 data marketplace it kind

of leaves that smart contract ecosystem and therefore you can actually not enforce any more that the financial gains are being sold shared in a equal way so therefore we came up with this concept proof of trust and the idea is that um that data union creators stake a certain amount on that proof of smart contract and um if they would ever violate the terms and sell the data without the users or if they sell any kind of user data that the users actually never intended to monetize then their stake is being slashed and it's being redistributed among the members so going back to the very example at the beginning that i had from facebook who

that had to pay this 90 million dollar fine in that case that fine would actually go to the users so the stake would be redistributed among the users instead of um yeah just evaporating in some eu treasury or i actually don't know where it ends up but definitely not with the users um yeah that's it thank you so much guys for joining if there are any questions if i don't know if we have time or yeah over there uh the question was how we support selling anonymous data is that correct okay so um well the data is uh encrypted at the source and um it depends a little bit however on the

use case right so if you're selling your car's data that is fully anonymous because you don't have to put your name behind it it's just your car um whereas in the other sets for example in the example of swash which is the browser plugin um your name your data is being de-anonymized but then you potentially could go back to that so the burden of that to fully anonymize it is actually on the builder of the respective data union and i think on the long run that could also become like a specific usp for the individual data unions right because you could have a data union that is like hey we're super privacy friendly everything is fully anonymized and then some others which are like well we're kind of

anonymized but not fully um and maybe in that case you get more money in the other case you might get less money so yeah oh we don't have time unfortunately then come and speak to me later thank you guys [Applause]