Today’s technology landscape is defined by two critical but competing elements. Data, the lifeblood of the digital age, is fueling unprecedented insights and analytics, allowing companies to do more and to do it more effectively.
At the same time, data privacy is becoming a big deal for consumers, and governments are taking action accordingly. Privacy regulations are spanning the globe – from Europe’s GDPR to the California Consumer Privacy Act in the US – are impacting the ways that companies manage data, reflecting shifting consumer sentiment about data privacy and security.
In almost every way, these two trends are linked. The incredible collection of personal data that platforms store to generate meaningful insights about their customers make them sitting ducks for data thieves who are eliciting data breaches at an alarming rate.
In 2019, the average data breach compromises 25,000 records and costs companies $3.92 million, making our current data arrangement untenable for companies and consumers alike.
To put it simply, if big data is going to be a part of our digital landscape – and it is – the way it’s collected, analyzed, and stored will need to change.
Using Crypto to facilitate Big Data
Cryptocurrencies often gain attention for their head-turning, headline-making price changes, but Charles Hoskinson, a co-founder of Ethereum and the current CEO of IOHK, sees cryptocurrency as a way to change the data analytics landscape for the better.
He recently joined the data analytics startup Endor as an advisor. The company, which has already provided data analytics services for Fortune 500 enterprises like the Coca-Cola Company, is often described as the Google for data analytics because of its searchable interface that allows companies to gain specific, actionable insights into their customers’ behavior.
With the platform’s latest release of the Endor Protocol, they are providing a decentralized environment for data analytics that introduces cryptocurrency into the data analytics space.
In an interview with the company’s co-founder and CEO, Dr. Yaniv Altshuler, Mr. Hoskinson described the intermediaries that facilitate today’s data landscape as “middlemen of necessity”, while elucidating on the ways that they negatively influence the affordability and availability of data analytics.
He notes, “they do whatever they need to do for their particular business model, and over time they become so powerful that instead of just being a facilitator of an interaction or a marketplace or a business process, in many cases, they can mandate how that entire business needs to run.”
Therefore, by rethinking the arrangement between data providers and data analyzers, Endor is hoping to create a new ecosystem that’s marked by trust, intentionality, and efficiency.
The Endor Protocol is equipped with a native digital token, EDR, that incentivizes data providers while providing an on-platform payment mechanism for those looking for statistical insights. It’s an end-to-end business model for the future of analytics.
What’s more, by encrypting user data from the beginning, this model inherently prioritizes data security as a critical component of long-term data availability.
Putting the Platform to the Test
In June, Endor took first place at Metlife Korea’s Collab 5.0 Innovation Program, an achievement that landed them a one-year contract with the insurance company to bring new data analytics to an industry ready for new insights to drive their future business models.
Moreover, the Endor Protocol is being implemented at several SMBs that will provide a real-world assessment of the technology’s efficacy.
The timing couldn’t be better. As the data ecosystem continues to power on, collecting people’s information and exploiting it for new insights, Endor is presenting an opportunity for ethical analytics that can help secure and incentivize big data.
While it’s evident that aren’t transitioning to a data-agnostic ecosystem anytime soon, now is the right time to shift the paradigm and to open the possibilities for new ways of collecting, analyzing, and storing data, something that consumers and companies know all too well.
Vladislav Sopov
Dan Burgin