An unexpected way to make money?

They say knowledge is power, and also that money is power, in the same way, you could say, knowledge is money, the more you have, the more money you could make, and that is exactly how today’s data economy works, it is so valuable - in fact, that two of the top tech companies in the world, Google and Facebook, are based on this premise, Google offers you a search engine and advertises based on the searches the users make.

In a similar way, Facebook gives you it’s social platform in exchange for learning about your habits, relationships, and “likes”, all of this information is used, you guessed it, to sell advertising to you based on the insights they get on user data, the use of the Facebook platform to create political influence and propaganda is in the base of the 2016 Russia investigation in the US elections.

Both of these have been unimaginable for past generations, and this field is now seeing new players joining in to change how this market operates. With the advent of the blockchain, startups are finding new mechanisms to encourage users to share their information with the platform in question, the way they do so is by having tokens on the blockchain used as both rewards for the users and a way to purchase services from the platform.

The next wave?

Data brokers like Repux uses its tokens to buy anonymized data from small businesses, and then using the blockchain to assign a reputation rating to the data, which is then used by other developers in creating machine learning algorithms based on true information, a sort of “data marketplace”.

Similarly, IOTA promises to use a combination of AI and blockchain technologies to make sharing economy ventures easier, a number of big names in the auto industry are said to have gone into partnership with IOTA, the status of these collaborations is not yet clear though, and various rumors exist as to what is the nature or maturity of these joint projects

The holy grail of consumer information, the actual spending done on credit cards seems at first to have no relation possible to blockchain and it’s innovation, but a startup called Rubiix has created a way for the consumers to monetize their data, and already has 10,000 active users using their app, the use of cash back programs to motivate credit card use is nothing new, but using a token to stake consumer data is, the same token is used to reward the consumers as is used to buy campaigns and data by advertisers, thus giving the token a huge value proposition.