Trust and security are often associated with one another, and blockchain offers either or both. Blockchain plays a vital role in storing transactions, creations, and historical occurrences, enabling individuals to reference and verify from the genesis point while maintaining information security.
This has a significant effect in the legal space, given NFTs and smart contracts can provide actual authentication and backlog. Simultaneously, they ensure that all human parties involved are recorded and updated accordingly. This latter described ownership and recorded the transfer of information plays a large part in user-generated content. Want to know more? Keep reading to discover what we think are the top internet trends regarding data security and ownership.
Digitalization has accelerated because of the Covid-19 pandemic, correlating to the rise of cloud storage use - and singular entities, usually service providers, control cloud storage services. This centralization brings about data security and data privacy worries, as there have been many major cloud security breaches resulting in users’ private data being exposed1.
The attackers would not be able to breach or force a shutdown of the platform that leverages blockchain because the platform would be decentralized and distributed across hundreds of nodes.
The global computing market is expected to be worth $974.3 billion by 20262.
Seal Storage is a prime example of how blockchain-based data storage services are already impacting on data and digital asset security. Seal worked with Casper to better secure our NFTs and provided us with NFT Media backup, insurance, and encryption.
Although a relatively new concept, NFTs are increasingly used to support the validation of ownership around copyrights, trademarks, and even the preservation of moral rights for ownership.
Instead of relying on human-made contracts alone, NFTs can support the evidence needed to claim ownership. While NFTs and smart contracts still need to adhere to local regulations and laws, as they are not a replacement for legal validity, they provide a more efficient and traceable solution. Intermediaries are removed through NFTs, allowing creators and artists to connect with their audience directly.
With that being said, preserving and proving authenticity is only one of the possible utilities of NFTs. Casper’s new NFT standard, CEP-78, paves the way for enterprises to unleash the potential of NFT technology. Learn more about CEP-78 and NFTs on Casper here.
E-commerce platforms built on a blockchain remove the need for third-party data protection applications and give consumers control of their own identity through dApps.
Despite the impressive growth rate of online sales, not all consumers seem to trust the e-commerce sector. A study by MarkMonitor and Clarivate Analytics3 revealed that more than half of consumers who don't shop online avoid using online retail because they are worried about scams, personal data breaches, and identity theft.
A blockchain-based e-commerce industry eliminates these apprehensions, as user data can be protected through a distributed ledger. Such e-commerce platforms remove the need for third-party data protection applications and give consumers control of their own data.
Social media has constantly been evolving. There are 4.70 billion social media users worldwide in 20224, equating to 59.0% of the total global population. The problem with current mainstream social media platforms is that, even though they profit from creators that are individual users, these platforms act like central authorities and owners of their users’ personal information and the content they create. Censorship is another issue yet to be solved in popular social media platforms.
Banning violent, hateful, and dangerous content helps protect social media users from malicious online activity. Still, censorship should not be a right given to a particular group in a social network. Due to its decentralized nature, blockchain enables community governance for banning malicious content, providing a much healthier consensus mechanism that is censorship resilient.
Blockchain-powered social networks will be community-centric and will incentivize creators for their content. In other words, “user-generated content” will also be user owned. Last but not least, data privacy is another pain point of current social network platforms, where malicious actors can target centralized servers containing user data. Blockchain-powered social networks will not gather user data, hence will be more respectful to users’ data privacy.
Data privacy is one of the most significant benefits blockchain will introduce to messaging applications. While many messaging apps use end-to-end encryption, they can still collect data about their users, called metadata. This includes information like who they talk to, for how long, on what device, their IP addresses, and phone numbers. Blockchain technology effectively exceeds encryption by adding another level of privacy, as messaging dApps will offer instant messaging without needing to provide any personal data.
To give an idea of the potential of decentralized messaging applications, there are currently 2 billion active Whatsapp users.
Video sharing and streaming platforms rely on user-generated content. While video creators are often compensated with ad revenue, the revenue distribution has caused much controversy5 over the past years.
According to Global Media Insight6, there are currently 2.6 billion unique YouTube users. While creators that meet the eligibility criteria of YouTube’s Partner Program7 are given a portion of the advertising revenue8, an update to the platform’s Terms of Service released in November 20209 stated that creators that can’t meet the criteria will not be able to earn any revenue from ads. Even though YouTube will earn ad revenue on their videos. In addition, those who do not create content, solely viewers, are inevitably bombarded with ads independent of any rewards.
Blockchain-based video-sharing platforms will be accessed via crypto wallets and distribute rewards to creators and viewers alike. The potential of blockchain-powered video-sharing platforms promises a more interactive and user-centric experience by replacing the existing “users watching advertisement” model with the “watch-to-earn” model. This new “watch-to-earn” model will incentivize users to watch and participate, creating new ways of engagement for companies and advertisers.
Intellectual property is an invaluable asset class in today’s rapidly moving global innovation ecosystem. A 2020 report10 has revealed that 90% of the market value of the S&P 500 accounted for intangible assets such as patents. Yet these assets have been historically mismanaged and underutilized due to their intangible nature. Traditional business metrics fail to understand and determine these assets’ strategic and financial value.
Patent issuance in Web3 will go a long way toward solving problems for inventors and venture capitalists, benefiting all stakeholders involved in the innovation processes. The security and transparency of intellectual property will significantly improve through blockchain. Blockchain technology can ensure that intellectual property records are neither manipulated nor deleted while providing the flexibility for certain permitted parties to have selective access to on-chain data.
CasperLabs partnership with the patent technology innovator IPwe11 is an excellent example of how verification processes will improve patent registration and ownership. CasperLabs and IPwe have joined hands to build a chain of custody (CoC) solution to store, secure, and trace patent data.
Users will have more control over their data than what has been available in traditional ad platforms. Users have full access to their information on the blockchain and can choose which parts they want to share with advertisers or other parties involved. Brands will need to engage with their customers deeply, and blockchain technology can provide the infrastructure to achieve unmatched customer engagement, focusing on the users versus the brand12.
Crypto-integrated browsers represent the next step in the development of the web. Through blockchain and cryptographically secure dApps, these new browser types will give people more control over their data by utilizing decentralization.
To access these dApps, crypto wallets are needed, and crypto wallets are simple to incorporate into traditional web browsers. Users can access the crypto economy without using any KYC or AML procedures. Additionally, individuals can use wallets without intermediary assistance and maintain full ownership of their assets.
Blockchain technology will disrupt how companies, organizations, and individuals handle data. From marketing practices to social media, blockchain will fundamentally change data-related disciplines and industries. It is built on a fundamentally different infrastructure, utilizing distributed peer-to-peer networks compared to the existing internet, which relies on server-client relationships.
In the following part, we will focus on how blockchain will revolutionize commerce and governance, improve inclusion and make many industries more accessible to the global masses.
