Data is the new battlefront where the boys will be separated from the men in the quest for operational and business efficiency of corporations and individuals alike in the future.
From cars, fridges, phones, and even buildings, the Internet of Things is promising to bring zettabytes of data for synthesis and dissemination in various applications.
Moreover, in the battlefield, there will be kings, and then there will be mere pretenders to the throne.
Before they can take on the might of data corporations like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon, blockchain based initiatives must define proper and precise strategies to democratise data.
No one is doing that better than The Quadrant Protocol.
Let us find out why this blockchain will be the force to reckon with in the future…
The Industry
One of the most exciting manufacturing enterprises is a milk plant. When we take milk to a factory, we expect many processes to give us pasteurised milk, UHT milk, milk powder, Yoghurt, Ghee, cheese, sweetened condensed milk, ice cream and a host of many other by-products.
The data industry is no different. Vast racks of computers gather billions of pages of raw data, and from that, they glean patterns, predictions and deductions, which can now be sold as products and by-products to users who want synthesised information.
Where does this data come from?
We started with the good old straight worksheets that used to store names, age, sex, social security, home address, etc.
Now the source of data is enhanced by the billions of internet users and their devices who take photos, temperatures, videos, air quality, machine health, human biometric data and all other pieces of random information.
It has now become apparent that almost anything can collect data. Even the chair you sit on at work can tell the world how many hours you put into desk work, and the laptop can better refine whether it is relevant work to your organization or not.
Who owns all this data?
The jury is still out. Human right groups cry foul any time data is availed to law enforcement.
There is now a growing discontent about the disproportionate power social media platforms have bestowed on themselves by getting people hooked on screens, generating data and getting nothing but targeted marketing after the data is sold to corporates.
Do we have challenges in the industry?
There are many challenges with the synthesis of data. We can summarize a few below;
Data Silos; Most organisations keep the data they gather from their dealings with their stakeholders like workers, suppliers and investors as corporate secrets. The bigger these companies are, the more they can employ artificial intelligence and other technologies like machine learning to create patterns and predictions, and then sell these outcomes to other corporations. This means that the bigger the company, the more it can quickly acquire free data, synthesize it and sell it to marketers, regulators, or in darker trades, criminal activities.
Fake News and other outcomes; like in any other industry, the data industry has its fair share of manipulation for economic gain. Recently, it was actively claimed that the American election was invaded through the bombardment of the social landscape with fake news and suggestive data from hundreds of thousands of user accounts from Russia to influence voters.
Users of data want authentic and truthful data. They need systems that can vet data, and ferret out fake, unauthentic and illegal feeds.
Fragmented free data feeds; If we are to depend on free data feeds, we end up with very fragmented data products that are not sustainable and cannot be used for any meaningful output.
If corporates want to complete aggregation of data for their purposes, the end up buying data expensively from many sources, and the same can be diluted by cross-pollination hence wasting money and time.
Data producers must be vetted for authenticity, and then compensated to sustain regular data flow that can be used to generate useful and ground-breaking discoveries.
Fair Remuneration to producers; Up to the advent of the blockchain, data producers have been either earning a pittance for their data, or nothing at all.
For data production to be enabled and enhanced, producers must be compensated each time their data is used.
Fighting Centralized Data Behemoths
We are all in agreement. The centralized data companies have had their field day raking in billions of dollars at the expense of the people who generate the data and give it to them for free.
The industry is ripe for decentralization. Data producers and users must be compensated for their contribution to a data economy.
However,:
The solutions that are being flaunted in this industry need a critical look if one is to pick one among many decentralized solutions to data economy.
So… Let us pick… you guessed right!
The Quadrant Protocol
The Quadrant is a decentralized data management system that is designed to enable the reception, creation and distribution of authentic data with a high degree of provenance.
Through the collection and mapping of disparate sets of data, Quadrant will use Nurseries, Pioneers, Elons and Guardians to run the blockchain.
The architecture
Nurseries will be the producers of ‘stars,’ which are simple original data pieces. Nurseries are also commonly known as Atomic Data Producers (ADPs).
Pioneers will take the stars and group them into Constellations. They are the data vendors who will purchase small pieces of data and build insights and patterns of primary interest using smart contracts on the blockchain for sale to more advanced data vendors.
Elons are the elite visionaries of the ecosystem. They will build new and exciting products from the constellations and constellation blueprints that are built by the pioneers.
Guardians will secure the blockchain by authenticating and protecting constellations, time-stamping them and ensuring no unauthentic constellations are circulating.
The solutions brought by the blockchain
The protocol is addressing three main issues that bedevil the data industry
Proof of authenticity and provenance
The element of trust is of utmost importance to the data economy. People want to know that they are buying data whose provenance is reproducible no matter how many times it is sought.
This is adequately provided by the immutability of well-designed blockchains like the Quadrant. Once a data set is produced and deployed to the network, it is stamped to keep the details of its origin, always.
Quadrant will stamp all data at the entry to their blockchain and ensure that the data maintains its provenance throughout its history.
Creating constellations for disparate data
A constellation is an arrangement of separate sets of data into a usable mesh.
At the Quadrant, this is a value-adding step that minimizes the costs of data analysis by the user, and also ensures that various relevant sets of unique data are presented into a user's preference without risk of cross-pollination.
It will even be possible to create constellations of constellations, and ultimately have Elons who can create customer specific data products.
Fair remuneration
ADPs have for long only been paid the first time they avail the data they have created.
However, with the Quadrant's fair remuneration formula, a Nursery will be paid every time their data goes up the constellation ladder or is used as a single source from the blockchain.
Comparative analysis of Competitors in the Data Economy Industry
Streamr:
Their blockchain promises a storefront marketplace for global data, permissioning and validation.
It doesn’t promise to do anything on data aggregation and proof of provenance, or the use of elite data analysts to provide market solutions for users.
It states clearly that it is a single interface data interchange system, and therefore there is only one tier of data generation, as opposed to the Quadrant's three.
Ocean Protocol
This blockchain categorizes what it is selling into assets and services, with the asset class including data and algorithms, and the service class including processing and persistence to leverage assets.
This will be done through a Curated Proofs Market that could use technologies like ZK-SNARKS to check for data integrity and a data curation popularity staking system.
Still, it doesn’t bring out the transparency authenticity and trust factor for data integrity as well as the Quadrant blueprint.
The Quadrant’s Roadmap
Starting in the second quarter of 2018 when the main net is launched, the quadrant's milestones are well spread up to January 2020 when the guardian nodes are brought on board. In between, the system will scale in three other main milestones, including data authenticity in May 2018, constellations in October 2018 and micropayments.
Final Thoughts
We are living in the data age. Information is the oil for the modern day industry.
Through IoT, the latest devices we have will be generating real-time volumes of data that individually don't look valuable, but when subjected to AI and machine learning processes will both give very detailed insights in virtually any field, or give the stepping stones to massive innovations that we can only dream of at current.
This can only be done through the democratization of data collection, analysis and remuneration.
The Quadrant is the first blockchain to address the real pain that ADPs face, and that is lack of proper and fair remuneration.
It also provides a better basis for trusting the authenticity and provenance of the stars and constellations that emanate from its blockchain.