In today’s world, the “bottlenecks” of productivity are stemming from the unclear boundary between the ownership and operation of data, causing copious valuable information to end in a stationary terminal.
Up to now, the Platform-Centric Economy, or centralized enterprise architecture, accounts for 99.99% of all business models. Yet the accelerated development of social collaboration is witnessing an irreversible trend of specialized division of labor. For a large organization or enterprise, most of its business, technical composition, and human resources are based on integrated resources. From a large manufacturing process to the cleaning of a small office area, it may involve leasing, hiring, cooperation, and other division of roles. In such a process, the proportion of pure manual labor has probably fallen to less than 10%, and the vast majority of the output cooperation is based on talent and intelligence. Furthermore, with the development of Platform-Centric Economy, content creators have become the main production of platforms. Enterprises have been handing over most of the data production process — content creation — to users. Thus there is the rising of famous apps like Instagram, TikTok, and so on.
Undoubtedly, data is the only core element in the communication and collaboration process. You can get this truth by following the trends of major corporations like Google and AWS, which are ambitiously carrying out AI training programs based on big data, expecting AI to become the next explosive growth point. The sharing economy (1.0) platforms have absolute data control — the weak connection (1 to many) between the platform and users is deepening the competition and grievances.
People have seen the growing possibility that platforms can do evil in the future, which has actually become the norm. Ordinary people can be treated as “meat on the chopping board” in the face of these high-tech companies, for the latter has taken control of each user’s data. A great example is the notorious Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica (CA) scandal, in which the political data firm CA acquired data of over 87 million Facebook users for user analysis and targeted trending of campaign ads to influence U.S. voters in their election campaign.
Each year, tens or hundreds of billions are spent by high-tech companies on commercial operations and R&D investment — Should small institutions and individuals give up to save the desperate situation? Definitely NO.
The game-changer might be blockchain and cryptography — the technologies that will help us build an equal and efficient human cooperative relationship. Centralized companies and classical platform economies are not fit for future development. It is right now that we should start the revolution!
In the future, the core asset of human beings will be data assets. It is necessary for us to store all important data assets in a decentralized storage network. Filecoin, the world’s largest distributed storage network, and the world’s largest “zero-knowledge proof network”, uses content addressing (CID) to return to users the files stored in the Filecoin network. In short, mastering CIDs means mastering data, and we can control the ownership of these CIDs through programs. In the previous article “The Application Paradigm of SINSO Getway”, we mentioned the data governance architecture with multiple separated roles. SINSO Getway not only solves the efficiency problem of data upload to Filecoin but also makes it clearer to govern various data builders.
What we aim for is to make the division of labor among various roles effectively organized. The specific contradiction in the real life is that: Those who buy resources are not necessarily the end users, those who have money may not necessarily have the ability to produce content, and the end users may not be able to get the final contribution revenue. The revolutionary point of blockchain technology is to put the rules at the center of the economy, not the resource controller. The most common “endless loop” in the medical industry is that many institutions have mass data but cannot use it effectively, either due to fear of competitors’ infringement and plagiarism or because they are afraid of infringing on privacy and causing alike trouble. They would rather seal up the data completely than bother using it in practice.
Regarding the practice of data governance, NFTs are a great start. As a token (contract) that maps off-chain assets to on-chain assets, NFT uses technology to define a social contract linking the creator economy and its community. Will NFT be the core technology of Sharing Economy 3.0? Of course! NFTs are essential for individuals as the key to protecting personal data property. Although most NFTs have not only a beautiful presentation and also a promising prospect; Whereas, NFTs anchor the ownership of data, not the data itself. The technology of NFTs has not yet arrived at the endpoint here — Far from it.
First of all, the mapping relationship between NFT and off-chain assets requires a real decentralized storage architecture. We have seen many centralized storage architectures being used to support the current NFT loading experience, which is very dangerous. To maintain decentralization while ensuring efficiency, this is exactly what SINSO Getway will do — We have released the SINSO Getway SDK — The first milestone completed!
The next key component we are to release is SINSO DataLand, unified storage space for personal metaverse data. While our NFTs transfer across all chains, our data can always be stored in a consistent space. SINSO DataLand provides an NFT browser with archive function, and a decentralized identity (DID) integrating the Web2.0 and Web3.0 identities for users to access their own “data land.” You can picture SINSO DataLand as a data explorer on a decentralized architecture.
It is rather important for humans to master such a data territory. A common concern with NFTs is that we want to ensure the avatars, pictures, and various related data are under our control. DataLand provides a complete view into these concerns, relieving users from anxiety and allowing everyone to easily create their own NFTs. While the transaction and transfer of NFTs depend on the community and the market, SINSO DataLand ensures data ownership and creates a fair and secure environment. Based on such a technical architecture, we can place a company with a market value of $100 billion and a citizen with a deposit of only $100 on an equal level of data security for normal trade and exchange. The private domain of data can stimulate the enthusiasm of creators, as Hayek said, protecting free property is the premise and foundation of a market economy. SINSO DataLand is the territory of protected data.
What will be the first function of SINSO DataLand? Above all, we can use DataLand to mint ultra-large-scale data NFTs at a low cost. In 2019, Google collaborated with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and the University of Cambridge on a three-dimensional reconstruction of the Drosophila brain, using approximately 27 million single 40Mb images- about 1PB of storage capacity was required. The neuron image of a single brain is at least 100 times the current capacity of Filcoin’s entire network — you shall never doubt the data production capacity of our brain. Connected to SINSO Getway decentralized cache network, SINSO DataLand can turn Gamefi’s NFTs into dynamic NFTs with rich data content, and mint NFTs based on a large number of images and videos. Heavy gas fees and slow storage efficiency are no longer bottlenecks.
Secondly, through links with other mainstream NFT platforms, we can save data assets to DataLand to back up users’ data. Of course, we can also just save a link without copying the data. Rather than a storage space, DataLand turns your data into a “data asset”, thus realizing financialization and monetization. Since NFT is a programmable contract, you can define the equity and revenue share that you exchange with the community and enterprises, and other institutions. It is easy to manipulate through CID. For example, the following code right involves NFT cross-chain and manipulates CID:
The CIDs and procedures we saw at DataLand work well together. DataLand will be packaged as an SDK for mobile phones, making it convenient for other platforms to call. For example, NFT wallets are embedded in DataLand’s mobile SDK to check their data stored in a decentralized manner.
With SINSO DataLand, we can build NFT contracts for individuals and DAO organizations. Behind DataLand is not a network disk, but a “zero-knowledge proof network”. DataLand can build a Dropbox, but not vice versa, since DataLand is worth more than 1,000 Dropboxes. Zero-knowledge proof provides a convenient and practical verification method, so that data/accounts outside of Web3.0 (off-chain) can easily obtain on-chain verification, and gain the trust of the Web3.0 ecosystem, making it possible for the exchange between data/assets. Without a trusted third party, can the fairness of the transaction be guaranteed?
Imagine such a scenario: a buyer is carrying a cash box, and the seller is also carrying a box containing some valuable goods. It is best for both sides to bring weapons to prevent the other from cheating. The two sit on either side of a table, count down 3–2–1, and push boxes to each other at the same time. When no third party was present, and the two parties did not trust each other, it is easy to understand that either party is reluctant to go first and hand over their box. Because once the other party run away immediately after getting the other party’s box, one of them would result in loss of money /goods.
Now replace boxes with data packets — because the object of human future transactions will be data — we need to lower trading frictions to the most to complete transactions quickly, and the weapon will be a proof algorithm with enforcement. In a society with extremely low transaction costs, the explosion of productivity is enormous. In the future, we can use data assets on DataLand for mortgage lending. Of course, the NFT market has already implemented these features, and DataLand has helped NFTs expand their boundaries. For example, individuals can donate their medical data in an anonymous way and get rewarded for contributions without disclosing any information — which is difficult for us to do without a zero-knowledge proof network.
DataLand is not only for NFTs but also opens up to the enterprise storage + computing market. Filecoin is gradually introducing its virtual machine (FVM) as planned to integrate basic storage and computing resources. The main purpose to support the operation of native Filecoin Actors (Actor is how Filecoin refers to smart contracts) that compiles other programming languages into WASM format, meanwhile, FVM supports the runtime environment of external smart contracts (such as EVM). The compatibility of FVM to EVM has reached an out-of-the-box level by simulating the underlying bytecode, and also supports developers to use their familiar Remix, Truffle, and other tools for direct development. FVM is an important data governance framework for SINSO, and most smart contracts do not need any changes to migrate to FVM. DataLand+FVM can realize decentralized computing of data: computing directly on SINSO Getway nodes and in storage space on the Filecoin network.
To conclude, SINSO DataLand anchors the domain of individual users’ data space, and we strip the computing layer out instead of giving it to the platforms. Let’s imagine, if we can use DataLand combined with FVM to build a DAO-based organization, for example, a DAO to improve sleep quality. Sleep monitoring data be stored in personal space, which can be viewed and authorized through DataLand, data utilization and algorithm analysis can be constructed through FVM, and then personal health intervention and improvement will be carried out through a costumed trained model. When the amount of data reaches a certain benchmark, the DAO will exchange with external entities such as insurance companies, and automatically make dividends. It is completely feasible in theory. When we see data coming back to individuals, we will see endless applications that turn individuals into content producers and DAO stakeholders.
