Crypto breaks Google-Amazon-Apple monopoly on user data

Blockchain is undermining big tech companies and cloud providers, especially when it comes to the Internet of Things.

For decades, banks and insurance companies have used the same mostly static but highly profitable and centralized business models. Also for decades, big tech companies such as Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Google have monopolized user data for their own benefit. However, blockchain projects could significantly challenge Big Tech's hold on user data.

In 2015, the future of money was top of mind for financial experts at the World Economic Forum in Davos. There they began to seriously focus on the challenges posed by the rise of Bitcoin (BTC), digital assets and fintech. The world of finance began to realize that new technologies were disrupting everything in the industry, from savings and trading to cross-border and peer-to-peer payments and transactions.

Then in the summer of 2020 came the renaissance of decentralized finance (DeFi). After a few years of extraordinary growth of this new concept, the economics of the machine began to take center stage and to question who would own the most important new commodity in the world, data.

Thanks to blockchain, we have DeFi, SocialFi, GameFi, and a new emerging asset class: the financialization of machines (MachineFi), or the decentralized machine economy. It allows owners of the billions of internet-connected devices worldwide to monetize them and developers to create decentralized applications (DApps) that collect data from devices to monetize them.

Related: Nodes Will Dethrone Tech Giants From Apple to Google

An obvious question is: Why? Why do devices need financialization or decentralized markets? The answer is pretty obvious.

Big Tech has built trillion-dollar empires by selling...