The pitch

If you've been in the market for a while, you've noticed how things run on hype-cycles. We've recently seen the DeFi hype that mooned several projects in the space. We also saw the NFT mania that still seems to have some significant steam behind it, and now we are seeing the Metaverse hype, with all kinds of crypto projects related to it performing beautifully. We also saw the ludicrous dog-coin hype moon all kinds of useless projects.

There is one segment of the market that we still haven't seen have a real run and it is one that seems to have most parts in place, just waiting for something to happen. I believe we should pay attention to the incoming Data hype.

Back in 2017, The Economist called Data the "new oil", being the most valuable resource of the current economy, and highlighted how

Data are to this century what oil was to the last one: a driver of growth and change. Flows of data have created new infrastructure, new businesses, new monopolies, new politics and—crucially—new economics. Digital information is unlike any previous resource; it is extracted, refined, valued, bought and sold in different ways. It changes the rules for markets and it demands new approaches from regulators. Many a battle will be fought over who should own, and benefit from, data.

(I really recommend you all read this article).

5 years later, we can see that this is absolutely true. If you check the top 10 global companies today by Market Cap, you will notice how most of them are deeply involved with Data. Out of the top 10, half of them are directly involved with data (Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google) and others either generate, process or heavily consume it (Tesla and Nvidia, for instance). Data went from allowing targeted ads to the matter that feeds powerful AI and deep-learning applications.

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Taken November 17, 2021

As one can immediately glance, however, the world's Data right now is also extremely centralized in the hands of a few trillion dollar companies that can do whatever they want with it and I think the biggest reason why that happens is because most people still don't appreciate how valuable Data is. As we can see in the quoted article, Data has indeed created new monopolies. What we should also pay attention to, though, is that it will also create a new economy. If one takes into consideration that, back in 2017, the World Economic Forum already estimated the Data Market to be worth some US$ 3 trillion, one can immediately appreciate the huge implications of this.

We are talking about the creation of a new asset class that not only we all produce pretty much every moment of our lives, but that it will also be valued, bought and sold like goods, stocks or crypto.

Talking about crypto...

Crypto always had pretentions of revolutionizing the way finance is structured, privileging decentralization free exchange and personal ownership of financial assets. We already know that crypto has proved largely successful in this task with Bitcoin, Ethereum and the whole DeFi space. We now see crypto once again revolutionizing digital property and ownership through NFTs which are, at its most essential, Data.

If you add both together, you can immediately grasp how crypto is uniquely positioned to benefit from the budding and nascent Data market. Through different crypto projects, Data can be generated. Through NFT's, data can be tokenized and owned. Through decentralized finance mechanisms it can be bought, sold, staked, rented and whatever else we can imagine.

There are already good projects that allow people to benefit from this:

• There are projects like Audius, Livepeer and Filecoin that each in its own way can store and share data on the blockchain. Some of these have already shown great results this year.
• There is Brave's Basic Attention Token that is already changing our relationship to internet browsing and ads consumption.
• There is Fractal Protocol that allows you to control the data you create online and how you share it.
• The Graph and Chainlink both provide different kinds of data that will help build future blockchain applications. Also strong names in the market.
• Last - but not least, nor final - there is also Ocean Protocol, that provides the Market Place where all this data can be bought, sold and staked.

All of these moving pieces, together and in due time, will radically alter the Data market as it is now structured, reducing the control a few select companies over it, and allowing people not only to have more control over it, but to be rewarded by it. I hope this somewhat long article has brought some interesting information and insight about this very important, yet somewhat neglected sector that could highly benefit from crypto.

Safe investments for you all!

(Disclosure: I own 3 of the 8 projects I mentioned. I do not intend to shill any of them, but raise awareness about some of what is happening regarding Data and crypto).