AllianceBlock Data Tunnel: Release Update, Background and Use Cases
In the last couple of weeks, AllianceBlock has celebrated the success of our Liquidity Mining solution and the launch of our DEX on Testnet. Another product we’re very excited to give our community an update about is the AllianceBlock Data Tunnel. The Data Tunnel is envisioned as the foundation of a global circular data economy by facilitating data sharing, analysis, integration, and monetisation between individuals and businesses—all without a centralized intermediary. Today, we’re taking a deep dive into its history, its potential to disrupt industries and share some exciting news about the upcoming public release.
History of the Data Tunnel
The Data Tunnel is a spinoff product that came from an in-house solution to our need to standardize massive amounts of data — a happy accident. During the process, we discovered that not only can we solve this challenge for ourselves, but we can also repurpose it into a product for other organizations.
The relatively nascent DeFi industry is ripe with data that we can leverage for new insights and opportunities for institutions of all types and industries. The idea that you can easily query massive amounts of data across different datasets and databases through a single API made it suitable for other data types and applications, not limiting us to the DeFi or TradFi industry per se. That’s where the idea for a global data marketplace was born.
Our Promise — The Circular Data Economy Facilitated by the Data Tunnel
We live in a world of data. Our preferences, information and even data we generate from our business processes are all used to streamline our day-to-day experiences online and offline. And yet, for all of the information we share, we cannot leverage and monetize our data. Only a select few organizations can use and take advantage of this massive amount of internal and external data. We aim to level the playing field with the Data Tunnel.
Data Tunnel promises to provide a platform that allows users and organizations to easily upload their data, standardize it, and monetize by renting it out. This data could come from business processes or databases of public information and the like. The platform removes the hassle of time-consuming preparation and sorting of data and provides an easy-to-use user interface that allows other users to work with it. The platform puts the control of data back in your hands and facilitates the creation of a true circular data economy.
Data Tunnel for the Enterprise
The Data Tunnel helps companies standardize their datasets and quickly extract them via a standardized API. Combined with a catalog/marketplace where you can “surf” your company’s data lake, it makes data more accessible and usable for decision-making.
We built an enterprise Proof-of-Concept (PoC) version of the Data Tunnel, allowing companies to deploy its powerful functionalities in their business processes. We have been working closely with a large EU-based Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) to identify the core functionalities and learn what their needs are, who will be using it and how we need to deliver it. They are currently using the Data Tunnel to explore their integration opportunities.
This is an incredible opportunity for us to gather initial insights and feedback from a successful enterprise prospect who’s currently using the Data Tunnel under an exclusivity agreement. This is also the perfect way to start filling the platform with high-quality industry data that will be used to kickstart the public version of the Data Tunnel. This allows us to release the public marketplace in Q1 2022, industry vetted and fully ready to be used, enriched and monetized.
Organizations Struggle with Siloed Data
Working on the PoC gave us a better understanding of how organizations struggle with siloed data. They can’t leverage the full potential of the data they have on hand because it’s challenging to manage, query, and manipulate them. Let’s take the automotive industry as an example, where we identified three key things that they’re struggling with.
The first challenge is data pooled from mergers and acquisitions. The merged/acquired companies often come with datasets having their own backend systems, data types and formats, and administrators. These different data management practices make it challenging to create a single set of decision-making data.
The second is the complexity of the supply chain. At each step of the manufacturing process, stakeholders such as vendors and suppliers bring their respective datasets. In addition to that, production processes and even geographic locations make it impossible to have a centralized and standardized data storage.
Third, while manufacturers hold a treasure trove of valuable data, they cannot leverage the data they have that can be made publicly available for monetization. Research opportunities, data sharing to improve industrial processes or insightful metrics are often left unused within the company because of the complexity in standardizing that data for easy use and access, not even including the actual challenges in monetization and governance of the data.
The Data Tunnel enables users to easily upload, standardize, and query datasets of various types and formats. This solution can bring data siloes together, and valuable decision-making data can be queried cost-effectively and in less time. Moreover, it also makes it easier to monetize data publicly available, making it an all-in-one solution for these enterprise challenges.
Tapping into research and university data as the driving force of the data economy
Many research institutions, universities, and knowledge organizations create a lot of data and are more than willing to share it. They don’t necessarily have competitors, but they simply don’t have a way to monetize their data easily. Taking on the task alone is costly, especially if it’s not their core competence and makes it simply not a business priority. By creating a specialized marketplace for such groups, we can more easily attract users and, more importantly, promote data sharing.
Data Tunnel Benefits the Community and Increases the Utility of ALBT
We’re confident our data marketplace will present us with use cases beyond the ones we’re currently focusing on above. The sheer accessibility and decentralized nature of the Data Tunnel mean that individuals and organizations will be able to interact with the data, create new data sets, and get paid in ALBT by those wanting to use their data.
We can imagine a snowball effect — the more organizations that use the Data Tunnel to host their data, the more high-quality data sets will emerge. As the demand for new data sets increases and the creators receive payments in ALBT, the platform’s activity and the utility of our token will increase simultaneously.
If you see any other potential application area, new use cases, or know a company struggling with the challenges and pain points we’ve shared above, feel free to reach out to me directly and help launch the circular data economy!
About AllianceBlock
AllianceBlock is bridging the gap between decentralized and traditional finance by remedying issues in both spheres and linking them more closely together. 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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