Crypto is breaking the Google-Amazon-Apple monopoly on user data

cointelegraph.com:

For decades, banks and insurance firms employed the same mostly static but highly profitable and centralized business models. Also for decades, Big Tech firms such as Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Google have monopolized user data for their profit. However, blockchain projects could significantly challenge Big Tech’s grip on user data. 

In 2015, the future of money was at the forefront of financial experts’ minds at the World Economic Forum in Davos. There, they started to seriously focus on the challenges presented by the rise of Bitcoin (BTC), digital assets and fintech. The world of finance began to realize that new technologies were upending everything in the sector, from savings to trading to making payments and cross-border and peer-to-peer transactions.

Then in the summer of 2020 came the decentralized finance (DeFi) renaissance. After a couple of years of seeing an extraordinary rise 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.

Thanks to blockchain, we have DeFi, SocialFi, GameFi and a new emerging asset category: machine financialization (MachineFi), or the decentralized machine economy. It enables 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.

Related: Nodes are going to dethrone tech giants — from Apple to Google

One obvious question is: Why? Why do devices need financialization or decentralized markets? The answer is quite apparent.

Big Tech has built trillion-dollar empires selling user data. Blockchain can change that by democratizing the data and machine economy.

Historica