We already know tech giants like Microsoft, Facebook(Meta) & Google, etc. Aggregate and monetize their user’s personal data (mostly for advertising). When we start considering beyond personal data like climate, economics, supply chain, agriculture, healthcare, education, etc. We realize only <1% of the world's data is analyzed. Access to data is a powerful tool to solve and scale solutions to complex world problems.

It's not personal (against internet companies) and here is why it shouldn't be - “Those privileged by circumstances will always exploit their opportunity”. If it isn't the silicon six. It is still your unicorn startup. It's simply the name of the game.

I myself have contributed to products that collected data without consent and used it in pretty unpleasant ways against the person who provided the data.

So what's the solution? - NFTs (An Erc721 Token)

Think of NFTs as a wrapper for any data. From enveloping your profile picture to your search strings on Google, and even to the very house, you live in. Or even just the bed if you are a couch potato. (Fractional NFTs need an article of their own.) Owners of Data NFTs can hard code rules that regulate and license access to any external third party(user, advertisers, etc).

For instance, Ocean Protocol’s Technology gives Data NFT owners the ability to create “Datatokens”(ERC20). Advertisers & data engineers buy these data tokens to gain access to the underlying dataset of this NFT.

This allows an economic model - where the money paid; Directly reaches the data owner, in the monetization process. And where a better portion of the power is returned to the data owner.

Here is a better example:

A small production company creates an NFT [ERC721] for their movie(Also a data set). Amazon & Netflix can use Ocean Protocol’s technology to buy the rights to this movie And create sub-licenses for viewers to watch this movie.

On Ocean Protocol, the license to access the movie is represented by ”Datatokens”. Hence giving the owner of the movie direct access to the revenue through data tokens.

Here is where things get super interesting:

Firstly, The price of the data token is regulated by the Ocean Marketplace, Where data investors trade and stake Datatokens for profit.

Secondly, Such marketplaces open up the data economy. Access moves from a handful of companies to data owners; in a free market. Where they understand the fair price of their dataset and are incentivized to trade.

Defined as DataFi, an extension of DeFi. Liquidity pools and tokens can now be backed by real-world datasets.

Data is the new oil or gold. I finally see how it fits into the puzzle of finance and especially decentralized finance(DeFi)

Currency was first backed by gold, and then it became debt/credit bonds and so many other things until governments started printing it out of thin air.

DataFi and DeFi are one of the many applications of web3 that can change this. At large, it truly is the biggest economic innovation we have ever seen.

I hope you enjoyed my article. I hope was able to open a whole other dimension of thinking when it came to NFTs, Data & Finance.