Personal Analytics Engines through Blockchain: Disrupting Big Data

I don’t know about you, but I cannot drive without my Google Maps. I recall the days when I was driving in new cities or on long stretches of unknown territories around the world with a map that was never folded at the right place. I don’t think I could ever go back to that now that I am so accustomed to the comfort of having an electronic co-pilot. Some could wonder if this is bad, but at the very least we agree that it makes driving easier, safer, and much more fun.

Now imagine that you have a 24/7 consultant that is helping you navigate not just the streets and highways but the important questions of your life and business, enabling you to make decisions informed by the plethora of data and analytical models that even the strongest intuition cannot match. Over the past few decades, harnessing the power of data and predictive analytics required access to massive centralized databases that can only be leveraged by massive corporations like Google, Facebook, Twitter and the likes, who can mine data from numerous customers and have the deep pockets to hire data scientists that can make sense of it all.

However, blockchain is now threatening to disrupt the big data industry as well through Endor (https://www.endor.com/), the first company promising to democratize analytics through blockchain and become the “Google of predictive analytics.” As opposed to Google however, which is a centralized platform, Endor promises a decentralized protocol called Endor.coin that enables any member of the community to contribute to its improvement and be rewarded in tokens, which in turn can be used to answer questions from an ever-enhancing prediction engine.

A protocol enables something. Just like TCP/IP is the protocol that enables peer-to-peer exchange of files, and Blockchain is the protocol that enables the peer-to peer exchange of assets, Endor is proposing to be the protocol for the Internet of predictions, enabling anyone to improve it by plugging in new prediction engines! Just like anyone can build new applications on Ethereum, anyone can use Endor to create new businesses, such as new blockchain enabled insurance models, predictive eHealth and personal medicine, optimized services for small businesses seeking to better use existing advertisement services, innovative marketing models on blockchain, and so on.

The key to all of this will be building a vibrant community of users and contributors. On centralized platforms, community happens through “if you build it [the platform], they will come.” On blockchain, the motto is “if they come, they will build it”, and bringing contributors is done by giving them tokens. We typically think of such tokens as securities to be liquidated, but Endor is promising a new method: the tokens (EDR) will not be liquidated but rather act as a utility to access the overlaying services, such as data or predictive models. Endor plans to build its capabilities by committing 60% of all tokens to contributors: entrepreneurs (called “catalysts”) that will build businesses using the platform will receive 25%, researchers that will build the algorithms used in Endor’s library will receive 15%, and strategic partners such as Bancor and ORBS that will maximize distribution of the Endor coin will receive 20%. It’s not easy to build a decentralized system, and such an appropriate allocation of tokens will be vital to ensuring the right mix of stakeholders in the ecosystem.

The creation of analytics engines on blockchain — which Endor is doing — is a revolution in the way we think about and leverage big data. Using blockchain, a company like Endor provides (1) data sovereignty, letting users choose to provide their data in exchange for tokens; and (2) accountability, giving full transparency to the user as to what data and what engine was used to make a prediction. Compare this with a platform like Facebook, where your data is harvested under unfairly permissive terms (i.e. you consent to give everything just by using the platform), and where that data is used by opaque machine learning algorithms to decide what content to feed you next.

I don’t know about you, but I am ready for this next phase of the big data revolution.