The Most Valuable Digital Asset

Written by Swalé, Founder, Iuncta

It’s a beautiful Saturday afternoon in Brooklyn, surprisingly warm for a mid-winter day in late January. My last conscious activity was staring out the window of the Gentlemen’s Factory Innovation Lab in downtown, looking across at a contractor going through the floor plans of a loft in active construction. I wonder who owns it. Prior to that, I was reading about the world’s wealthiest people in 2022, which then prompted me to wonder about the most expensive items these individuals own, the priciest among them including jewelry, real estate, artwork and yachts. All material things in a world that is becoming less and less material and more and more digital.

With the evolution of technology and the revolution that is the blockchain, there’s been a shift in the perception of value of nontangible items, specifically digital assets. This includes cryptocurrency, NFTs and the metaverse, including its decentralized land and real estate within it. One can argue that they don’t have any real intrinsic value, yet another might be willing to spend millions in exchange for them.

I’m not here to argue for either because I don’t think either is right or wrong. Although I do believe digital assets have value, I don’t believe any of the ones I just listed are the most valuable. Web 2.0 has already validated this idea, and Web 3.0 will demonstrate the massive exploitation of it. But the most valuable asset or item on the internet today and in the foreseeable future is user online identity, so much so that the metaverse is merely a race to monopolize digital identity disguised as a more immersive internet.

Let’s level set though, and understand that this perspective is coming from a guy, me, who thinks of himself as a creative whose creativity takes shape in the form of technology, rather than calling himself a technologist. I also founded a privacy-first identity platform that identifies value in user profile data and digital interactions: Iuncta. With that said, I stand by my earlier declaration: The user identity space is for the most part — no, entirely — unregulated, which makes it extremely vulnerable and susceptible to exploitation.

So what has happened? Any and every online entity, including your favorite social media platform and search engine, has transformed itself into an identity provider, meaning they have authority over the access and sharing of your online data. They employ psychographics, tracking and massive data collection to amass a warehouse of user data that they can then claim as proprietary information. They then sell that data to advertisers who now bait users through the vulnerabilities their online interactions reveal.

What will happen in the metaverse? It will enable a controlled environment where the creator of that environment can manufacture every experience and manipulate the factors that dictate the outcomes of those experiences. Where users are monitored every second of every day, and all their interactions and behaviors are recorded and analyzed. It will facilitate an uninterrupted and constant upload of your personal data to a central database owned by that same creator. This data will be more valuable than ever.

According to current projections, global digital advertising revenue will surpass one trillion billion U.S. dollars by 2027. This is without having to explore the market opportunity in user identity that exists for Identity and Access Management platforms and CIAMs, Cyber Security Platforms, and even the unmentioned marketplace for identity that exists on the dark web.

I think these online platforms have been intentional in deceiving their users and having them believe there isn’t any real value in user online identity. Meanwhile, they’ve created massive revenue streams to grossly profit from those same online identities. Truthfully speaking, some online profiles are worth more than others. One could be worth a billion and another needs a group of a billion to be worth that much, so there is some analytics and data interpretation involved. To be fair, these online platforms do offer a “free” service, but the question always remains: Does the potential risk of personal data collection by these platforms outweigh the benefits they provide?

The sun is setting and work appears to have stopped for the day. The contractor has left and it’s just tools and construction materials left lying on the floor, which I’m guessing will be marble when it’s finished. Thinking back on that world’s wealthiest list, there aren’t too many on there cool enough to truly take up residence in Brooklyn — they just wouldn’t pass the vibe check. But if it did belong to one of them, their online identity would be worth way more than the multimillion dollar–appraisal value on this loft, and if they decided to mint an NFT equivalent of the loft, it would be worth way more than that, too.