By Matheus Darós Pagani
CEO of 4CADIA Foundation
Information is the new oil. Ever since the world computer network has irremediably transformed the way human beings relate to each other, companies have increasingly been paying attention to this reality.
Anyone with a smartphone today has access to the widest market of the most varied applications and services, most of them without requiring any kind of payment. It is possible to join a social network and make contact with millions of people. Or access a GPS service that shows the fastest or cheapest way to get to a particular location.
A whole generation of human beings have grown up in this world dealing with it as if it were a fact of nature. They use applications like they breathe oxygen, believing that they give nothing in return for this. Others pay derisory amounts for services of a technologic complexity that would have been unimaginable three decades ago.
The problem is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Every time a person clicks on the data access permission button to their personal information is moving a literally billionaire market.
To get an idea, the digital advertising businesses exceeded revenues of US$ 100 billion in 2018. There are millions of e-commerces, financial institutions, technology companies and other more or less obscure businesses competing for data from hundreds of millions of potential customers.
The blockchain revolution has come to break with this cycle and its effects have already started to be felt by many. It is possible to imagine a world where it is no longer necessary to make personal information available in order to obtain certain services only a few decades from now.
In fact, the decentralized network allows us to think of applications that would make it possible for the owners of information to accept its commercialization, implying a greater distribution of income to everyone. In other words, users themselves will be able to exploit the financial potential of their data, with ample freedom of choice, in a system in which Data is Labor, as coined by Radical Markets.
The promise of decentralization of blockchain enables the flourishing of cooperation almost free of friction between members of complex networks, allowing the generation of value and collaboration without the need of intermediaries or a central authority. This implies the elimination of costs that also include exposure of our privacy or the use of personal information as a bargaining chip.
This type of innovation may imply changes that go far beyond the financial system, with the cryptocurrency proposals that have been improved since the emergence of Bictoin, still the most famous among them.
In the pharmaceutical industry, for example, more and more companies have been employing blockchain as a way of reducing the total cost of supply chains, with a strong impact on the quantity of fake medicines sold in the world — 1% of the market in developed countries and almost 70% in the Third World. By documenting and verifying production and transactions at all points in the chain through blockchain, many companies have gained greater control over production and distribution of medicines, reducing the number of participants involved in transactions and eliminating intermediaries.
In terms of food, blockchain solutions have been used to solve problems of food fraud, security recalls, inefficiency in the supply chain and food traceability. This issue becomes particularly important when it comes to supply chains involving the participation of dozens of intermediaries.
Other real examples already exist in several niche markets, such as information security, health services, civil identification, public administration, Smart Contracts, transport, among others.
The elimination of intermediaries has led to cost reduction in numerous processes, increased security, privacy protection and transformations that are well beyond our reach to understand or direct.
In this new world that is being built, information will continue to be an important commodity, but it is very likely that we no longer need to treat it as batering. After all, if we are not able to properly value this precious good, it is difficult that we know how to properly sell anything else. Isn’t it?
