How AllianceBlock Data Tunnel Is Set To Power a New Data Economy
Data Tunnel unlocks the value of data by making it easy for anyone to publish, contribute, or consume reliable and standardized data
2022 has been a big year so far for AllianceBlock — having released DEX in June, followed by Fundrs in August, and more recently, an update to the DeFi Terminal website. These launches have drawn considerable attention from the team and the community, and we’re thankful for the consistent support and feedback we receive.
While these solutions have been in the spotlight for the past few months, the team is making steady progress on the upcoming release of TIDV (Trustless IDentity Verification) and the launch of the first listing on Fundrs.
Today, it’s time to spotlight Data Tunnel and revisit the vision behind the solution and how it will power the new data economy by unlocking new value from existing data.
A marketplace for reliable and standardized data
Data Tunnel emerged as an in-house solution to address the need to standardize huge quantities of data. During AllianceBlock’s development, we have amassed a large amount of data from multiple datasets, both on- and off-chain. However, these datasets come in different formats and structures, making it difficult to gain insights quickly across the set.
The beginnings of Data Tunnel were built to automate data standardization across multiple datasets and sources and to enable quickly querying across these sources, gaining valuable insight from the combination of data pieces. In solving this challenge, the team realized the solution could be further developed into a public data marketplace for standardized data.
Leveraging the vast intelligence in on-chain data was a clear opportunity that aligns with our ultimate vision of building seamless gateways into DeFi. This is especially important for traditional institutions and high-net-worth individuals, who are accustomed to leveraging multiple data sources for decision-making and asset selection. During the development process, it became evident that the solution would make it easy to query any type of data through a generic interface and that there was no need to limit the potential to on-chain data sources.
This is when we saw the potential of Data Tunnel to become a global decentralized data marketplace.
The data economy represents an immense untapped opportunity. Every day, individuals around the world create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — that’s 2.5 billion billion bytes, or 2,500,000,000,000,000,000. These are generated in everyday digital interactions and processed in multiple discrete data centers and servers worldwide.
On the other hand, organizations increasingly rely on data to refine decision-making, explore new opportunities, and evaluate the impact of business changes. Most of these data are sourced from publicly-available datasets or by paying for high-quality data sources.
Moreover, demand for data has already generated an economy worth almost US$3 billion and is set to grow to US$7.3 billion by 2027. By 2030, Accenture Research estimates that over a million organizations’ total value of monetized data will top over US$3.6 trillion.
And yet even with the amount of data being produced, stored, and sourced, there’s still a huge gap between the generated data and the ability of organizations to harness these data more meaningfully and to maximum effect. More importantly, data monetization has been cost-prohibitive and difficult to get started with, especially for individuals and smaller organizations. With this context and set of challenges, AllianceBlock sees Data Tunnel positioned at the forefront of this still-rapidly-growing industry.
Data Tunnel overview
Data Tunnel is a platform that allows anyone to easily upload, standardize, enhance, and monetize their data. Participants in Data Tunnel fall into three categories: Publishers, Contributors, and Consumers.
- Publishers upload (either automatically or manually) any dataset that is easily generalized and “understood.” They can earn revenue each time the data is used or subscribed to. Publishers may be individuals or organizations (both SMEs and enterprises) that want to create an additional revenue stream by monetizing their data.
- Contributors evaluate, combine and extend existing datasets to derive new insights and create new applications for using data. Contributors are parties that can help refine data by adding enhanced metadata and creating connections between existing datasets on the platform. Contributors who enhance a dataset may earn a share of its revenue. Contributors may contribute to their own published datasets or those uploaded by others, but the overall goal is to enhance the dataset’s usability and profitability.
- Consumers subscribe to datasets for solving complex business hypotheses, researching potential target markets, and better understanding customer traits or segments, among other reasons. Data is the key to success in modern digital businesses and efficiently accessing data with a subscription unlocked by ALBT simplifies this complex process.
The potential of standardized and accessible data for the enterprise
Many organizations struggle to extract value from their data, even at the enterprise level. In a study by Accenture, it was revealed that only under a third of companies reported that they could extract value from their data. This is due to multiple factors — such as the data types, formats, and structures they have on hand or the different data sources they have deployed across their organizations.
The opportunity for businesses and enterprise organizations lies in Data Tunnel’s ability to standardize different types of data, formats and sources and make them more accessible for use across the organization. With this, we anticipate that the development and adoption of Data Tunnel will take place incrementally.
Early adopters can deploy the platform as a white-label solution, allowing their own internal data consumers access to a centralized pool of standardized data. This could be a large corporation, for instance, with multiple locations across the globe or an established conglomerate of firms wanting to use data to further their shared goals.
As more participants join, there will be added value in enterprise networks of manufacturers, supply chain firms, and vendors creating industry-wide data marketplaces. Ultimately, the aim is to offer globally-compliant market access to various data across the globe.
The Data Tunnel marketplace enhances the utility of ALBT
Like all AllianceBlock solutions, the heart of Data Tunnel is ALBT. ALBT incentivizes publishers to upload and publish their datasets and contributors to enrich existing sets with enhanced metadata. Consumers can then subscribe and have access to these datasets with ALBT. The use of ALBT in Data Tunnel’s marketplace will help drive the liquidity of ALBT, enhancing its utility and creating further appeal for enterprise usage.
Development progress
Over recent weeks, AllianceBlock Co-Founder and CTO Matthijs de Vries have been providing a steady stream of updates about the Data Tunnel, kicking off with a presentation at the CV Lab’s CV Summit 2022 last September. Matthijs delivered a keynote that highlighted the data market gap and the challenges enterprise participants faced needing reliable, standardized access to data and presented the Data Tunnel as a solution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OVgiDk5RgI
AllianceBlock Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Matthijs de Vries, gave a keynote presentation titled “Powering the New Data Economy” at the CV Summit 2022 held in Cryptovalley, Zug.
Since then, Matthijs has followed up with a series of posts via his Twitter that elaborate further on the Data Tunnel's various features, capabilities, and use cases. One standout feature already highlighted during CV Summit 2022 is enhanced metadata, which allows for more meaningful descriptions and tags to be attributed to data, allowing otherwise unrelated datasets to be linked and creating richer and deeper ways to explore and leverage them.
A predictable, automatically-generated data format will underpin this functionality, ensuring that metadata can be enhanced by anyone easily working with a standardized data format and structure. Furthermore, anyone making a positive contribution to data on the Data Tunnel can be rewarded for it via a trustless, royalty-based revenue-sharing system that operates on-chain.
Developers and data scientists can choose between using a standard SQL query for manual analysis or exploring datasets or AllianceBlock’s proprietary ABQL language. ABQL is a JSON-based query language allowing each query to be seen as a structured object — perfect for accessing nested data in the Data Tunnel. Still, more importantly, it can be programmatically generated. This allows a more rapid innovation time for developers launching new products or features based on Data Tunnel data.
A “community datasets” feature also unlocks powerful features for organizations wanting to use datasets on an ongoing basis. It allows users to create a data collection application via an API to implement their own rules and verification processes, perhaps through TIDV. Collectively, these datasets are owned by the community that maintains them, whether a single organization or a collaborative effort between parties.
Data Tunnel may have emerged as a happy accident to the AllianceBlock suite of infrastructure solutions. Still, it’s become integral to our offering due to its high enterprise appeal. It creates an opportunity to create seamless gateways for traditional businesses beyond even the limits of TradFi, as it offers utility to all kinds of businesses, such as retail, manufacturing, supply chain, and agriculture — the industrial applications are almost endless. Furthermore, leveraging the enterprise opportunity can create unprecedented utility for ALBT.
We’ll continue to publish more development updates and sneak peeks of the Data Tunnel over the coming weeks, so make sure you’re following us on our socials and Matthijs on his Twitter profile, so you don’t miss any updates!
About AllianceBlock
AllianceBlock is building seamless gateways between TradFi and DeFi by remedying issues in both spheres and linking them more closely. They see the future of finance as an integrated system in which the best of both worlds can work together to increase capital flows and technological innovation.
They are building this future by bridging traditional finance with compliant, data-driven access to new decentralized markets, DeFi projects and ecosystem-scaling tools such as funding and interoperability. As such, they are building a next-generation financial infrastructure that aims to provide regulated financial entities worldwide with the tools they need to access the DeFi space seamlessly.
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