Blockchain Projects are Challenging Big Tech’s Hold on User Data

by Jayanti November 25, 2022

Blockchain is undermining big techs and cloud providers, particularly when it comes to IoT

For a very long, financial sectors like banks and insurance firms employed the same mostly static but extremely profitable and centralized business models. Also, for the last many years, many giant tech companies such as Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Google have used their user’s data for their profit. Although, blockchain projects could significantly challenge big tech’s clutch on user data.

If we go to 2015, the future of money was at the forefront of financial experts’ minds at the World Economic Forum in Davos. There, they began to seriously focus on the challenges presented by the rise of Bitcoin, BTC digital assets, and fintech. The world of finance started to realize that new technologies were altering everything in the sector, from savings to trading to making payments and cross-border and peer-to-peer transactions. After that, the decentralized finance (DeFi) renaissance appeared in the summer of 2020. After a couple of years of seeing extraordinary growth in this new concept, the machine economy started to take center stage, and concern over who should own the world’s new greatest commodity, data. And as all credit goes to the blockchain, we have DeFi, SocialFi, GameFi, and a new emerging asset category: machine financialization (MachineFi), or the decentralized machine economy. It empowers the owners of the billions of internet-connected devices worldwide to monetize them and developers to build decentralized applications (DApps) that draw device data for monetization.

Big tech has earned trillion-dollar empires by selling their user’s data. Now Blockchain is challenging big tech and changing this scenario by democratizing the data and machine economy. Previously, machine economies have failed to garner traction due to the infrastructure and capital requirements needed to operationalize them. Blockchain projects have upgraded by providing users, businesses, and developers with an end-to-end solution to distribute, orchestrate and monetize large numbers of smart devices as part of a unified machine network. Presently there are more than 50 blockchain projects related to the Internet of Things (IoT). There are also several traditional tech companies — such as IBM, Azure, Samsung, Apple, Google, and Amazon — that are combining IoT and blockchain to power the burgeoning machine economy