New infrastructure development in the era of data capitalization
June 20, the “Private Domain Awakening & New Fortune Internet” branch meeting held in Shenzhen Blockchain Week, CEO of Xinghanda Technology and founder of DMA community team Xin Weimin shared the theme. Mr. Xin Weimin said in the sharing, “Data is personal wealth” is gradually becoming a global consensus, and the consensus of data wealth needs to have the technical foundation to achieve, and at the same time, it must have a matching operation model and business model that appear simultaneously. Realize a new generation of wealth Internet infrastructure that is business-driven, data-centric, and a new generation.
The following are the main contents shared by Mr. Xin Weimin.
Going back to the beginning of the first generation of the Internet, in 1996 I had the opportunity to witness and participate in some developments at that stage in Silicon Valley. When Amazon first started selling books, Yahoo engaged in yellow pages, the corresponding infrastructure was still very imperfect, everything was still very early, and soon the bubble burst. After the bursting of the Internet bubble, some solid platforms and applications began to usher in real opportunities for development, and gradually created giants in the Internet era. In fact, this stage of the blockchain industry is very similar to the early stage of the Internet. It’s just that the speed of development and iteration at this stage is very fast, and it may explode with greater energy.
When an industry has gone through numerous stages of martyrs and bubbles, and some pioneers have steadily advanced through the bubble, the logic and methods in the discourse have become increasingly clear, and the industry’s best development stage has gradually come. And this process is the pioneer of the new generation and will lead the development direction of the next generation Internet. This is a very exciting moment. Some of the core projects in the past few years have been building infrastructure, but everyone finds that these infrastructures are still not enough, and it seems that they have not seen their commercialization capabilities.I think the core problem is that the real infrastructure, on the one hand, is of course a revolutionary idea and technology, and on the other hand, it is more important that it must be driven by the market and real commercial applications, which can be further improved. Optimizing this infrastructure becomes what we can really use to empower the next generation of commercial-grade applications.
What is the nature of the infrastructure that drives the next generation Internet? In fact, it is a process to promote data capitalization. There is a very important keyword for data capitalization, which is “My data is my property”.I think the wave of data capitalization is in the context of the times, and some applications are already practicing this matter, finding the outlet and breakthrough point. After the development of the Internet for more than 20 years, we have seen that it has brought many benefits and changed our lives, but with the formation of giants, its problems have gradually manifested, such as platform monopoly and data privacy and security problems. Information security is platform information security on the one hand, and personal privacy protection on the other. This is an era of rising personal privacy and right awareness. Users are very sensitive to this, but they are often powerless in the face of platform monopoly and abuse of privacy. Therefore, when one thing develops to a certain extreme degree, the next revolutionary thing will gradually take place, which will bring about a change and get rid of the inherent framework to solve the problem. The core of this change is the data capitalization and corresponding business logic changes.
In the Internet of information, we can only say that it is to participate and enjoy some conveniences and benefits, but we never realized that the data we created is actually a new kind of wealth. But now this kind of wealth is used by the platform to create their own wealth. In the process of transforming this data into wealth, we have no chance of participation and the right to benefit. At present, the Internet is a model of public ownership of data, or a model of large platform occupation. As the producer of individual data, we are contributing to the platform, but we do not have the power to monetize it. So this is a very important issue. We have no control over the security of our data and the attribution of data, which is equivalent to putting my wealth in the pockets of others.We can do some rights protection work through legal means. If something goes wrong, legal means can play a certain role in making up and restraining, but it cannot solve the fundamental problem. For example, last year Facebook paid $550 million to solve the problem of its personal data leakage caused by facial recognition. Without the confirmation of personal data ownership and the change of business model, it would rather be punished, so as to ensure that the existing business model can be operated.
From the perspective of the evolution of the Internet, I feel that in the process of entering the next generation of the Internet, many things we are doing are already moving in this direction. In the next few years, I think it is a very promising stage. We are all doing these things and are actually already promoting this process. The private domain Internet traffic just mentioned is a typical personal data asset, and I call it “My traffic is my property.” In fact, there are many types of data assets. Very typical data includes operator data and payment data. Take the prevention and control of the new epidemic, as long as there is operator data and transaction data, once crossed, all contact tracing becomes very transparent. Of course, there is a contradiction between emergency needs and personal privacy. There is also our mobile phone, in fact our mobile phone knows us better than ourselves. It slowly accumulates your data, including daily trajectories, and soon becomes more aware of ourselves than ourselves. There is also data from our own social network, which is already a very huge industry, and the value of this piece of wealth I think is still at the beginning of the outbreak. We had a meeting with industry partners in Shenzhen last year, the purpose of which was to launch a “data capitalization” initiative. In this year, “Data is personal wealth” is gradually becoming a global consensus.
This consensus on data wealth requires a technical foundation for implementation, which is the new type of technical infrastructure I mentioned and commercialization capabilities. At the same time, it is not just a technical infrastructure, it must have a matching operation model and business model to appear simultaneously, to achieve a business-driven, data-centric, new generation of new wealth Internet infrastructure.What are the basic components needed in this new infrastructure?First of all, it is to confirm the rights of the data owner, give each data owner an identity, determine data ownership, and lay the foundation for the subsequent data capitalization and realization. A basic technology for asset verification is DID-decentralized digital identity. This is why you can notice a hot spot this year, that is, the global industry is talking about decentralized digital identity. Many projects are doing this. For example, some global blockchain industry companies are using DID to do some Anti-epidemic applications based on privacy protection, including the GreenPass solution that we are promoting globally.
Another is the process of data standardization that needs to be done in the process of confirming the ownership of this data asset. Because there is no standardized data confirmation, even if a data asset is formed, future monetization and transactions will not be easy. With the standard, it can be more convenient to circulate, and even complete automatically without the intervention of too many people, so the standardization of data assets is very important.The distributed storage of data is an indispensable part. I won’t speak more on the storage topic today.
During the transaction of data assets, it must be considered that the parties may not be in a trust relationship. In this process, how can we achieve that I am willing to come up with my data, and you are willing to provide analytical capabilities to jointly realize the asset realizable value of the data and conduct transactions in a safe and controllable environment? From a technical perspective, I call it a trusted computing environment, but at the business and application level, I prefer to call it a trusted digital asset management and exchange environment. These aspects can basically constitute a new commercial infrastructure platform with data assets as the core. The infrastructure allows more people to come up and use it immediately, focusing on their own applications and business to maximize their value.
In particular, we should mention the DID that we are now studying in depth. Taking the private domain traffic just discussed as an example, DID stands for personal digital identity, and there is also an association between DIDs, just like the relationship in our online and offline life every day. I invited you, you invited him, for me, I don’t need to know the details of your true identity in a layer of relationships, but I know that you are a real person. In fact, this is a social network map based on DID, and the part related to you is your type of digital assets, which can help you and the related people monetize the data asset. So in general, what I want to emphasize today is that digital identity is an entrance in the new infrastructure and is a particularly important starting point.
To give an example, it is said that we have recently applied GreenPass in global epidemic prevention and economy reopen scenario. My idea at the time was that we could do personal health data management and privacy control at the same time, and solve this problem based on blockchain technology. Facts have proved that many countries in the world accept this concept very much. When DID is used to realize digital identity and data confirmation, there is no psychological or legal barrier to data privacy. Because of this, many organizations and individuals are more willing to participate. (find more about GreenPass here).
When an application is going international, it is very important to be consistent with the value system and policies of the country where it is located, especially identity management, identity-based privacy management, data privacy and security management. If these standards are met, the entry into this market has become very smooth.
Let’s take a look at this picture, this is a general model.
This is an infrastructure framework with the next generation of data capitalization at its core, including basic modules such as data collection, rights confirmation, storage, valuation, matching, and transactions. Of course, there will be some more basic infrastructure components to cooperate with it. In fact, there are many high-quality underlying technologies in the market that can be integrated and help them find business models. In order for the above commercial applications to truly realize commercial value, we try to create such a middle layer, which I call the LEO data asset commercialization base platform.
I can’t help but think that everyone can imagine the development of the Internet now. You might think that it may have reached the end of opportunities, because there are giants such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, and domestic giants such as Alibabab, Tencent, and Jingdong. However, in fact, there have been two companies that deserve deep attention. One is Pinduoduo and the other is ByteDance (the holding company of tiktok and other hot apps). Pinduoduo actually uses the social network’s relationship data extensively, which can quickly reduce customer acquisition costs and increase marketing capabilities. ByteDance is a rapid development of full use of personal data by AI technology. It is a precise personal data-driven traffic platform that allows applications to develop rapidly on this platform, such as Toutiao, Douyin, Tiktok. These apps further contribute more data to the platform. This is a typical example of using personal data to realize traffic monetization. However, it is still a monopolistic model of a centralized platform, and its success is not directly related to each user. Internet celebrities who desperately contribute to it may also gradually lose their enthusiasm because of the inequality of the distribution ratio. Especially those who have already Internet celebrities with a certain reputation, if their own data and traffic have more say and control, it would be great. So, although it said that the company has been valued at 140 billion US dollars this year and may be listed soon, in my opinion, it may still be a high-quality enterprise at the end of the Internet 1.0 model, or the Internet platform centric model. It is not a decentralized model for the next generation Internet. This is our present opportunity for change.
The beginning of the commercialization of the next generation Internet is a combination of technical logical architecture, business model, and operation model. We are currently in such a beginning stage. Some applications are now in the transition process from centralized to decentralized. The essence of the Internet of Wealth (IoW) is to allow individuals to create their own wealth with their own data. So I think it is very meaningful for us to discuss this matter here today. This new infrastructure model is applicable to all industries, whether it is games, e-commerce, media, or other. Especially from the perspective of community management incentive mechanisms and smart contracts, once the model is formed and opened, with the ability to enable applications, the next generation of many new business models and applications can be born quickly. This is the significance of the new infrastructure in the era of data capitalization.
Last but not least, I would like to say that there are many witnesses in any era, but most of them are critics and bystanders, only few are practitioners. We need many persevering practitioners to constantly explore and realize the real breakthrough point. I think I sense it now, such feeling is very good.
Weimin Xin (“Brian”)
2020.6.22
You can reach the author at brian@elastosdma.org or twitter @brianxin
