Why PetCommunity Exists
Creating a global standard for our pets, together.
The pet industry is a massive, high growth industry valued in the hundreds of billions. Two thirds of U.S. homes own at least one pet, and many consider pets as part of the family. Animal lovers are spending around $110 billion dollars on their pets in 2017 in the U.S. alone and are expected to spend over $128 billion by 2022.
Yet, despite the enormous size of the pet industry, a universal system for recording and accessing pet biometric health data that transcends country borders and company-specific siloed databases does not yet exist. Lack of such a unified, global database is hampering the true potential benefits that this data can provide when accessible to pet owners, veterinarians, university researchers, pet food producers, and more, in terms of providing better preventative and treatment care for pets.
Companies such as PetPace have taken the lead and are already recording 100,000 biometric data points on pet health every single day. Yet, this valuable information is not easily available to medical researchers, pet food producers, veterinarians, and other agents in the pet health industry.
Currently, such data is sitting in siloed regions — PetPace’s company-specific database, in this case. While some of this data can be made available to a university researcher through a data purchase, issues can arise when this data is found to be incompatible or inconsistent from data purchased elsewhere. Still, many others who can benefit from this data are not aware that this data exists or how to obtain it.
PetCommunity believes that, in order to truly unleash the true global benefits of biometric pet health data for the betterment of pets worldwide, there needs to be a unified industry standard for recording and accessing pet health data in a way that benefits all participants in the pet ecosystem. That way, an exponential amount of data can be collected and a standardized, universal method of accessing this data can be made available to all participants for the betterment of pets everywhere.
PetCommunity believes that the way to establish a true, trusted data network is through blockchain, rather than through any country specific or company specific database. It is this trusted, unified data standard that is needed in order to properly bring pet health data to all participants in the ecosystem on global scale in a way that was not possible before without blockchain. Because the data is secure on the blockchain, bad actors cannot tweak the numbers in order to better support their pharmaceutical drug efforts, for example.
A secure blockchain-based data network designed with thoughtful token economics is needed in order to encourage data contributors to contribute more data and for data accessors to trust the quality of the data they are accessing.
In addition to a global standard for recording pet health, the solution that PetCommunity envisions also solves problems related to the ID and Registration of pets for travel and search purposes.
