Realizing the Promise of Web3
Nate Holiday, Co-Founder and CEO
July, 2022
I’ve spent the last decade as an executive in the data and fintech industry helping companies harness their data to improve business outcomes. Leveraging customer data (1st, 3rd, and 0 party) to increase adoption of products and consumption of services. Optimizing operational data to reduce overhead and capital expenditures. The goal is growth and profits. Harness data, a company’s #1 asset, to increase growth rates, reduce costs, and improve margins.
Centuries of Brand Trust Conditioning
For over a century, companies have been hyper-focused on building brand trust. They have spent billions of dollars refining their data environments to better understand consumer sentiment and engagements. Billions more poured into building databases for control and ownership of data to build trust. Trust in their products. Trust in their executives. Trust in the missions, social interactions, and causes. Consumer brand trust translates to higher engagement; more clicks, photos, friend networks, web visits, messages, and locations. Many of these engagements are wrapped in consumer products such as phones, tablets, cars, televisions, laptops, and the various “in-home” devices that have become experts at listening. The promise in return for your data is improving your interaction with everything, everyone, everywhere.
Web2 Data Architecture is Broken
Over the last two decades, Web2 companies have been building central stores of data. In the first decade, IT leveraged centralized data software and built their own data centers, hiring armies of data-center experts and dramatically expanding data-center real estate footprints. There was a small stint where IT teams spent hundreds of billions trying to replace proprietary database software with open-source database software, but still tied it into generic servers (still in their data centers). In the last decade, organizations have spent hundreds of billions moving their data ecosystems to centralized database software (black boxes) and enterprise-grade cloud providers (a fancy way of saying another company’s data centers), effectively handing over their corporation’s number one asset to another corporation to manage.
Independent of who operates data centers and builds software, the data dynamics in Web2 are broken:
- Single Point of Control Architecture
- High Total Cost of Ownership
- Privacy and Security Risks
- Public and Consumer Trust Issues
- One-direction node operations retain max value, ownership, and control for centralized corporations
Unrealized Promises of Web3
The more time I spent in Web3 the more I realized that the promise of decentralized applications (dApps) is a vision, not a reality. What became evident very quickly was that Web3 doesn’t have mature tools for data management, and dApps run centralized database solutions. Most projects put transaction data on-chain and the vast majority of all their business data off-chain. Adding a little bit of on-chain transaction data to off-chain Web2 data feels at best Web2.5, but far from Web3.
In order to fulfill the promise of Web3, we need to ensure trustless and transparent systems, secured by the blockchain; we must ensure we don’t build on the same analytic black boxes that marred the last two decades.
Building a Decentralized Database is Difficult
As the Web3 business process and automation matures, developers and applications require advanced database computations to connect off-chain analytics directly to smart contracts.
Scalability in the current blockchain ecosystem makes on-chain analytics impossible, and existing centralized analytic platforms fail to generate secure, tamper-proof results. By coupling off-chain computation with decentralized and cryptographically-guaranteed data processes, Space and Time will securely power the next-generation data requirements for dApp developers and enterprises.
A Trustless Data World
We are on a mission to build the world’s first decentralized data warehouse from the ground up. To realize the promise of Web3 dApps must run on a decentralized database. Our novel cryptographic protocols, dubbed Proof of SQL, is required to bring back consumer confidence that data storage and analytics cannot be tampered with. The combination of a decentralized data platform and Proof of SQL gives control and transparency back to the internet constituents.
Providing a world where no single organization owns your data, where bad actors can’t hack your data, and brands must earn the right to your data has never been more critical for individuals or as a society as a whole.
