DADA Collective: Simon Wairiuko, Kenya / Boris Z. Simunich, Peru, collaboratively created using blockchain technology, a visual conversation.
“I should probably have told you sooner. I’m a twin. He lives in New York,” my then-boyfriend of 1 month revealed to me as our airplane prepared to touch down at John F. Kennedy International Airport.
“I, too, have a New York twin. Give me a strong drink and a good New York party, and you’ll meet a richer, carefree version of me,” I teased.
“I have an identical twin brother here. He’s fun. You’ll like him,” he replied casually.
We were only a month into our relationship, but I still wondered why he didn’t tell me sooner. To every twin I had known previously, sharing a genetic make-up—and nearly every major life milestone—was a huge deal. It was central to their identity and typically a powerfully formative experience. Some felt a special, inarticulable bond; others were confused by the lack of connection they felt.
Digital Twins: Identity, Privacy, Reputation, and Social Network
Our digital twins to lead quiet, parallel lives in the shadow of our physical selves.
Fast-forward 15 years later, and it seems like we all have twins. Anyone who encounters the Internet has several digital versions of themselves—sometimes crafted, cultivated, and curated across various social and service platforms, but sometimes created accidentally in the footprint of our Internet usage. Data patterns—pictures, biographical facts, and online behavior—are transmitted increasingly seamlessly and efficiently between platforms, with or without our knowledge, and a cohesive narrative emerges.
These data patterns allow our digital twins to lead quiet, parallel lives in the shadow of our physical selves. Often, we are completely unaware for years and, in some cases, even decades. Your digital twins are complete profiles. They aren’t merely a collection of a few random photos from your summer vacation or records from your latest online shopping spree, they are a comprehensive profile, including personal data that companies record outside of their own websites, in addition to data obtained from third parties.
Collectively, our digital twins have driven the growth of the Internet and the online platforms that provide services to us. These services—from Facebook and Instagram to LinkedIn and Amazon—are not actually free. By consenting to let the company own, use, and sell your personal information, you are selling them your digital twin. You trade them your most personal information for usage of their platform.
With ownership of your shadow self, companies then lend, sell, and otherwise monetize their version of you through advertising on a secondary market—all behind your back. And these companies know a lot about us. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed many of our worst fears about Facebook’s creepy and ethically shady practices in his 2018 testimony before the U.S. Congress.
If it sounds like George Orwell’s Big Brother, it’s because it is—but run by corporations, not the government. Thanks to an outdated and generally lax data protection regime, the ruling assumption is that companies own our digital twins. According to the laws, as they stand now, as soon as we click “I agree” after scrolling through the terms of service, our twins belong to corporations, with little legal obligations.
As consumers, we already have limited rights. But we need to become empowered and stop blindly accepting the terms of service and privacy policies that few read—and that companies write knowing few will read. We’re all guilty of this. I’m a lawyer who used to write these policies, and even though I don’t usually read them!
But our legislators have a responsibility as well. Right now, companies face almost no legal limits on what they can do with our personal data for their own profit. Our digital twins are theirs to do whatever they want with—to sell to a private corporation, a political campaign, even a foreign country. Lawmakers must return control of our digital selves to us, as well as broadly define our digital selves.
What if we could think of our digital twins as dGoods? Maybe, then, blockchain could enable us to own and organically track our digital selves? Maybe I could participate in digital commerce with more dignity and self-sovereignty—so that virtual transactions won’t feel like a highway robbery?
Tokenizing Your Digital Twin to Improve Collaborations and Interactions
Is tokenizing ordinary people a future?
In Chapter 3, we discussed opportunities in blockchain for celebrities and athletes. This raises the question, why should athletes and celebrities have all the fun?!
Jodee Rich,1 the founder and CEO of Kred and producer of NFT.NYC, is convinced that tokenizing ordinary people, and not just athletes and celebrities, is the future. Admittedly, when he offered to tokenize me during our conversation, I felt a little objectified. Thank you for offering to reduce me to a coin, I thought. That has been my lifelong dream!
According to Rich,
Blockchain is unique because it both exists everywhere and nowhere. It lives on many, many servers across national boundaries all around the world, but is entirely decentralized. It makes it possible for applications like NFT.Kred to let people take control of their digital assets. For instance, an artist can send artwork to fans and followers for comment.
Rich highlights how little control we have over our “social currency”—“likes” on Facebook, for example—and how NFTs can address this. You have a profile on social media and create content, building a network through connections. And you have very little control over what people do with it—over your social currency.
Our identities sit in silos on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. You don’t have control. Over your newsfeed and over the format. You will also find it very difficult to download your social connections. According to Rich,
NFTs are a scaffold that gives us control over our social currency. NFTs on the blockchain are immutable, so anything we put on it, no one else can change. It’s decentralized, and it’s stored, and we can control it with our keys.
Rich explains that in NFT.Kred, he has created a platform to put you in control of your social currency using NFTs. “NFTs tokenize social currency,” says Rich.
They carry identity, content, connections, and scarcity. NFT.Kred has created a platform that allows you, or any brand, to create your social currency. We can create your coin, card, badge, or any other token. We can take any digital asset, register it, and then trade it on the blockchain.
Digital Scarcity in the Infinite Digital Universe
If you didn’t feel objectified when Rich tokenized you with NFT.Kred, how you will feel when your social actions are tokenized?! First, let’s look at what a social action is and why we would tokenize it.
Rich explains,
An example of a social action is a “like” on a social media post. “Likes” are ubiquitous. But if I give you a “like,” you will still feel special. What I love about that is we all have this abundance of “likes,” we have this abundance of content, but when we share it with the people we care about, they still feel special. And that’s digital scarcity.
How did NFT.Kred solve the longstanding problem of how to let people control their network? Rich says, Brands and influencers allow their assets to be controlled by silos, big solid institutions like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. How do you give someone who is a big LinkedIn connector the ability to manage her profile? To have control over her contacts and then also to share her content across the network?
Rich explained,
Having worked with blockchain for years, a couple of years ago, we realized that we could take a coin that carries connections. If I give a coin to one of my connections and then he gave it to someone else, then the three of us would be connected. Now, if the coin had a topic associated with it, let’s call it a review of your talk at a well-known conference, then it has some content, too. Everyone interested in this critical review would end up connected on that coin. We would immediately have a small network that would be topic-centric. As soon as you have a topic-centric baby network, you have an engagement. That is what we have done with NFT.Kred and NFT.Kred.
NFT.Kred uses this protocol to collect individuals’ profiles, contacts, and content in one place. Not all of this data is put onto the blockchain, as Rich explains. “My vision is that someday, you will have most of your identities stored in the blockchain.” In a world driven by competition, Rich concludes by highlighting the idea that ultimately drives NFT.Kred collaboration. “I think I can contribute and make money in the world by giving people a catalyst for collaboration. We build tools that allow people to work together.”
Taking Back Control of Your Identity
Imagine not having to remember dozens of different username and password combinations for all the different sites you interact with each day. Imagine a world where you don’t have to share the name of your favorite pet to pay your credit card bill. And for those of us who’ve never had a pet, I’m always tempted to use my husband’s name because that’s the closest I’d come to owning a pet before I had kids.
Forget all that and meet Nuggets, who will lead you to the promised land free of those silly dilemmas. Nuggets allows you to own all that information safely on blockchain and to protect it from security breaches or cyberattacks on those third-party companies. Soon, several large organizations in the United States, Europe, and China will be using Nuggets.
Enter Seema Johnson, co-founder and COO of Nuggets.2 Johnson doesn’t have a tech degree. Her entry into the world of tech was as a “project coordinator,” where she learned the ropes and made the office coffee. It has been a steep climb for Johnson, and her hard work has paid off—she now finds herself as the co-founder of a leading blockchain company that has raised millions in an initial coin offering (ICO). Furthermore, she has achieved this as an Indian woman in the United Kingdom—and most impressively, while raising two young kids.
Nuggets has developed a blockchain platform that provides a single biometric tool for login, payment, and ID verification without sharing or storing your data. And the most remarkable is that not even Nuggets has any access to your data.
Say “No” to Honeypots of Data
Whenever we partake in online transactions, especially when we do our online shopping, we are giving out our information freely! We have usernames, passwords, and financial credentials saved across probably a hundred or more online locations. The problem with this is that all this information is being stored in these individual honeypots of data.
As honeypots attract bees, so does data attract criminals! Occasionally, data is compromised. You likely remember Equifax, Dropbox, Yahoo, and other major breaches from the headlines in recent years. And these are large organizations that spend billions of dollars on cybersecurity. Great, even more people have my information, is what I think every time I see a data theft headline. But I don’t panic or lose sleep over it. Why? It happens all the time. The honeypot model is just totally broken.
We all love shopping online. We need to exist online, but how can we do so while ensuring that we retain our privacy and remain secure. If there is a data breach, we must change our details for every single location. That’s the problem Nuggets solves.
The relevant term here is zero-knowledge. So what’s zero-knowledge again?
It is one of my favorite terms in blockchain. It sounds like something straight from a Hollywood spy movie. In cryptography, this term is a bit more mundane. A zero-knowledge proof or zero-knowledge protocol is a method by which one party can prove to another party that they know a certain value without conveying any information other than the fact that they know the value. You don’t need to reveal information to prove that it exists. A classic example is when you share your ID to verify that you are over 21. In the process, you reveal your exact date of birth and much, much more, whereas the bartender only needs to know whether you are over 21.
Johnson explains in numerous interviews,
We explored lots of other technologies before finding blockchain, but when we did, it was an epiphany moment. We realized that it not only gave us zero-knowledge storage it also ensured that there was no admin access or root-level access to the information. That’s incredibly important for delivering a solution like Nuggets.
She continues,
It gave us the immutable ledger—simply a record that cannot be changed—ensuring that every time you carry out a transaction, whether it’s a login or a payment, it happens successfully, and you have access to that information and no one else does. We needed the immutable ledger to be able to do that, and then we needed a high level of encryption that is inherent in the blockchain.
Another factor that Nuggets needed to consider is transaction speeds, an essential feature in delivering an e-commerce solution.
We are using a private blockchain. In a nutshell, when you download a product, you sign up is with your biometrics. It’s whatever biometrics there are on a device, whether it’s iOS or Android, and then it writes a private key that is the only private key. Then you take a still picture of yourself followed by a moving image to confirm your identity. It’s like a moving selfie to make sure that the picture on the ID matches your face. Then you take a picture of a credit or debit card, and we check all that information. We do a forensic check on the card, and then all your data is encrypted on your mobile device.
She continues,
Once it goes to the blocks in the blockchain, then all of this is covered via another privacy framework that ensures that only you, and nobody else, can see any of the information that’s in there. We need to protect the user, and we don’t have any back-door access to that then when we integrate with merchants. We’ve developed APIs that work with a lot of existing e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, and others. Something crucial about Nuggets is that we’re aiming at the mass market. Everyone shops online, and that means Nuggets can be valuable to a lot of people. A ton of those sites are built on Magento, Shopify, and their marketplaces. So we work with the merchants as well.
It is at this point that information is tokenized.
When you authorize, whether it is a login or a payment, that information is tokenized, and only a minimal amount of data goes to the relevant organization. For example, if it’s logistics, such as updatable information on your package delivery, then that goes directly to the logistics team rather than to everyone on the chain. I think that’s important to remember about the Nugget solution.
Nuggets offers login, e-commerce payment, and ID verification, and when consumers use it, they are rewarded in “Nugs,” a virtual currency that can be accrued. Johnson compares it to a loyalty scheme. On the merchant’s side, integrating with Nuggets solves several critical issues. Johnson explains, “We all know data is critical. The ways we keep information are just not working.”
So Why Own Your Digital Twin?
So why? Why own your digital twin? My hope is that you answer this question with a “duh, who wouldn’t want to own extensions of their self?!” and an eye roll. There are at least five main reasons that we should have ownership over our digital selves.
First, our digital twins are an extension of ourselves. They reflect who we are as individuals, how we spend our time, who and what we like and dislike, our preferences and quirks. That’s because we use the Internet for just about everything and our lives are increasingly digital and virtual. The idea that when we use the Internet, we consent to the use of the data we input is outdated. It made sense when we went online for just a few things: shopping, booking flights, even e-mailing. But today, we use the Internet for just about everything. It’s an extension of our physical space, our physical reality, and it mediates much, if not most, of our very existence. In fact, in 2019, you can hardly function as an active member of our society without the Internet. Our digital twin, then, captures not just our marketing demographics or preferences but all of what makes us human.
It only makes sense that we have agency over our digital selves, just like we have agency over our physical selves or even our intellectual property. Why should a company’s collection, aggregation, or manipulation of data about us change the ownership or create new rights? When you take a picture of Picasso’s artwork, it’s still his art. That you just snapped a quick picture doesn’t mean you now own the image. Similarly, when you tell a friend a deeply personal secret, it’s still your secret. You would never expect that they would spread it—sell it, even—and claim that it became their information to share when you divulged it. Why should the way we think about our digital information be any different?
Second, our control over our digital twin is an inalienable right, up there with “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” We can work every day, albeit for very long hours, but we can never be expected to surrender our liberty. No matter what the employer asks, we have the right to walk away at any time, subject to the terms of contract, but never with the prospect of losing our liberty hanging over our heads. Most of us exchange our time for a paycheck, and in doing so, voluntarily give up certain luxuries—waking up at noon or taking a 2-hour mid-day nap. But we are not legally forced to surrender our very liberty or right to selfhood to our employers. Our employers can’t jail us or enslave us. They can never own us.
Similarly, each of us should have control over our digital twins, even after we permit companies to use them in a defined way—just as we permit our employers to use our physical selves in a defined way. Selling our digital twins should be no more enforceable than selling our selves. It should be negotiated, equitable, and entered freely.
Third, clear, inalienable, individual ownership of our digital twins will encourage the development of more sophisticated technologies to keep track of and manage our digital twins. Companies will be forced to compete in the creation and use of these technologies, and consumers will enjoy more choices of social platforms with different technologies and policies, and ultimately better services and more options.
Today, there is essentially no competition or incentive for companies to innovate in social platforms. If you read a company’s terms of service and privacy policy, disagree and refuse to consent, what are your alternatives? You will be left behind in the digital revolution. If you’re a small company, and you don’t want to hand over your digital self to Facebook, you technically have the right to refuse their terms and not use their service. But without access to the most widely used sales and advertising platform, your business will not be able to survive, much less compete. Have you noticed that a meaningful alternative to LinkedIn, Facebook, or Amazon does not exist? Where would you go if LinkedIn one day decided to cancel your profile in the middle of a grueling job search? Would it not be devastating? Where else would employers find you?
Fourth, if we do establish clear, inalienable, individual ownership of our digital twins, we will encourage the development of meaningful alternatives to existing services. The main reason for such high barriers to entry for possible alternatives to these social platforms and services is that each existing company already controls so much territory and information. Each company is a monopoly in its own area, owning every part of our digital twin.
Any person who wants to enter the market by creating an alternative will have to start from scratch—and immediately compete with an established giant. And our profiles are not portable. Users cannot move their connections, activities, or comments to a competition platform or service in any meaningful or efficient way, even if one existed.
And fifth, our digital twins are the fruits of our own labor. We invest significant time and energy into our profiles. We make decisions about which pictures to upload, with whom to share information, and what to comment on the posts of others. Creating a digital twin is a creative act. And if our energy went into creating it, it belongs to us.
The fact that we use discretion doesn’t make it any less our own property, or any less an extension of us; in fact, choosing how to express ourselves is perhaps the most intimate extension of our own identity. Just because an artist uses commercial paint (as opposed to making his own), that doesn’t mean that the paint company owns his work. He made decisions on how to use that paint, and those decisions are an extremely personal reflection of his own vision and identity. Why shouldn’t the ownership of digital selves stay with the creator, just like the ownership of a painting stays with the painter?
Creations of Your Mind on Blockchain: Rethinking the Ownership
With the growth in digital music and, more recently, music streaming, the music industry will have to consider new ways of remunerating artists and valuing creativity. Remember Taylor Swift’s war with Spotify? Could blockchain have been the solution?
Entrepreneurs are increasingly turning to blockchain to make content sharing fairer for artists. Several companies are capitalizing on smart contracts to allow revenue on purchases of creative work to be automatically disseminated based on licensing agreements, according to CB Insights.
You can’t discuss digital rights and music without mentioning the future of streaming services. Here’s just one. Last year, Spotify acquired Mediachain, a digital rights management start-up. Mediachain has been working on using blockchain technology to solve problems with attribution— an area where Spotify needs help. Online tech industry publication TechCrunch noted that it had to settle a lawsuit over unpaid royalties.3
Eliminating Digital Rights Theft
Blockchain could effectively eliminate digital rights theft. It could enable artists to release their music and control the data and terms of use on their own terms, and royalties would be distributed in real time via smart contracts. “If anytime anybody uses a music file anywhere in the world, that action is automatically recorded by a public blockchain, and the transaction would be validated. You’d have no digital rights theft,” explains Greg Cudahy, EY Global Leader, writing in “Blockchain reaction: Tech plans for critical mass.”4
The Open Music Initiative5 is a consortium that seeks to leverage blockchain technology to resolve royalty disputes. It’s not building a platform. Instead, it’s creating an open-source protocol for the uniform identification of music rights holders and creators. Likewise, other companies such as Audius6 that aims to eliminate middlemen in the music sector and Ujo Music7 that aims to change the way things were remixed will likely disrupt the music industry soon.
Content Creators Suffer the Most
Founded in 2016, SingularDTV launched its content-driven blockchain- powered entertainment dApp Breaker in January 2019. During our discussion, Breaker’s co-founder and CEO Kim Jackson8 emphasized that transparent value exchange, the main component of blockchain, helps artists retain more control over their creations. She says, “It could ensure total control over rights, revenue, and royalties, and a direct relationship between artists and fans.”
Jackson explains,
As an entertainment executive I was very aware of the issues that independent film companies face. It’s tough to sustain a business model that does not allow you to retain value because intermediates such as Netflix and Amazon extract value. And currently that’s the main way you can get your intellectual property (IP) distributed to mass audiences.
Jackson noted,
If you’re a content creator, and you sell your content, you’re out of that equation. There’s no sustainable business model for continued revenue because the creator is cut off from the data related to the audience behavior and revenue reporting. You are also decoupled from IP because you signed away your rights for, say, 15 years. There was a problem in our business models from independent content creators’ perspective; we are learning intrinsically what blockchain technology could provide.
Producer and artist Gramatik, as featured in Alex Winter’s Trust Machine: The Story of Blockchain, a Breaker original production. Copyright: Breaker.
Putting the Creator at the Center with Data
Jackson and her co-founder Zach LeBeau were joined by Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin in creating SingularDTV. According to Jackson,
For me it was always about the distribution platform tool, where content creators can track and monetize their IP. Consider a film. I knew I would be able to see where people were watching it. As a content creator, you would be able to collect data on your audience and, most importantly, own the data and benefit firsthand from the revenue.
Such a model allows for content creators to stay in control of their business model.
The business model now is still one-sided. You could raise money and create content, but it’s doubtful that you’re going to be able to see a return on that content. Your investors are not going to see their return. Most importantly, you can’t even provide them with any transparent accounting to show them that there was an activity because you have been completely cut off from it. Essentially, what we saw was an opportunity to build a distribution platform for content creators that operated the same way. We know through market research that audiences don’t care where they find content, be it a movie or a piece of music—they want ease. They want it when they want it, where they want it. They don’t care if it’s on iTunes, Netflix, HBO. They want the show.
Breaker has created something that, according to Jackson, addresses the needs of both the audience and the content creators.
From the audience perspective, we built something that operated the same as what they are used to. But from a content creator perspective, it is different because you, as a content creator, are the one who gets to benefit, and now you can create a business model based on it. Whether you’re an individual artist, a production company, or especially a studio with large accounting overhead, you’re able to have this peer-to-peer transparent accounting, IP tracking, and data collection, and you own it. That is powerful; it is one of our business models, and that is what we are building. We are still a start-up. We’ve been in business for about 2 years now, and we only launched our beta product to the world in January. Now that we are in beta, we’re testing how people interact with it.
Never mind leading the audience into new solutions, just keeping up with audience preferences in a fast-paced world isn’t always straightforward.
Breaker is available as a desktop and a mobile app. People want it on their phone, or they want to listen to music on their phone, or they want to watch something at home on another device. We’re building that. In the meantime, we have produced original content, and we’ve acquired some more content so that we can test and learn how our product operates. We needed to own content that was ours so that we could experiment with how we want it to perform, as well as to test new models. You prove how they will work and how they will benefit in the marketplace. You can turn around and market it properly to both content creators and audiences.
Do audiences care about the nature of their relationship with the artist? According to Jackson, “We are learning whether we can get audiences to care about that relationship. Do they care whether their money is going directly into the artist’s pockets or is used to ‘paying the man?’ How do we get them to care about a local exchange and a peer-to-peer exchange? Out of the gate, the data and the marketing say they don’t care. They want to come home, get a glass of wine, and watch what they want to watch, and they don’t want more steps. They don’t want to work for their entertainment.”
“We’re looking at film, television, music, eBooks, any IP,” continues Jackson.
Essentially, any IP can have a channel with under-the-hood functionality. Hopefully, in the future, we can allow people to participate in the success of an entertainment endeavor and an artist. That’s the long-term vision. It is tied to the whole token economy, and with that, there are regulations and complexities. It isn’t easy. Right now, we’re focused on film, though we will be going into music soon. It’s a big opportunity. It is a slightly different business model and a huge nut to crack. We’re talking about releasing the song and the movie at the same time.
Putting Creator at the Center with Payments
In terms of payment, an understanding of audience needs goes a long way in making a platform user-friendly.
You don’t have to use crypto; you can also use a credit card. We gave users that option on purpose. We didn’t want the regular audience to be freaked out by having to use new technology. Although you can, and we do show people how to make a wallet. I always encourage it.
What is Jackson’s long-term vision for Breaker?
The vision is a lofty set of decentralized entertainment platform tools. I would be so thrilled to see that become a reality. But there are a lot of steps and a lot of obstacles before then. That’s the purest vision, and we are purist in that sense, but it gets tough because we do have to make compromises.
Considering its potential for the entertainment media industry, we can see that blockchain could address problems from content access, distribution, and compensation to managing assets, digital rights, and financing. There are other examples too. British blockchain start-up JAAK9 is developing an Ethereum-based platform that allows media owners to convert their repository of media, metadata, and rights into “smart content” that can self-execute licensing transactions (CB Insights). It is building a blockchain platform “to bring clear and timely payments to the creative class.” They allow creatives to publish content, manage contracts, and transact payments from a single portal.
Property, Commodities, and Real Property: New Flavors of Ownership
Digitizing Physical Objects and Real Assets
If we are going to put ourselves and creations of our minds on blockchain, why not digitize and put real, physical objects on blockchain as well? It is a logical next step, to the extent one finds digitizing physical objects logical. Real-world assets can be put on blockchain by separating asset ownership into its constituent parts.
Of course, digitizing physical assets is not a new concept. If you have ever scanned a document, you have created a digital copy of it and digitized it. In fact, do you remember when Google Books began scanning all 130 million distinct titles in the world? Do you remember how controversial that was? It is not hard to imagine that we will see a similar controversy when it comes to digitizing physical objects and real property.
For example, the team behind Mattereum10 is intrigued by the idea of achieving legal title over every physical object in the world using blockchain technology as the medium. The team is trying to “bridge the gap between programmable blockchain smart contracts and actual legal contracts.” The underlying legal concept is that all assets have owners who can decide how best to manage them.11
When registrars on Mattereum network are granted legal title over certain assets, they can set up on-chain smart contracts through which assets can be programmatically purchased, sold, rented, assigned, and partitioned. The granted legal title will be used to resolve disputes and enforce resolutions as well.
Vinay Gupta,12 CEO of Mattereum, observes,
I think a lot of this is just legal spaces beginning to acquire concepts from software engineering. And some of those concepts will come across as foreign. Both computer programmers and lawyers deal with large texts. But computer programmers have 50 different tools for helping them manage text. And lawyers just have one tool—Microsoft Word.
Lawyers Are Programmers Who Made a Wrong Career Choice
Gupta wonders,
Why don’t lawyers have more sophisticated tools for managing texts? Why don’t they have the same kind of tools that programmers use for managing texts at large scale? There are tools for simple things like finding the location of content, comparing it to another document, and seeing who touched it last. But why is that stuff not substantially automated in legal practice!?
In Discussing Mattereum, Gupta explains, “At a high level, we are building a tool to change the legal ownership of an object. We want to be able to change the ownership of the objects by putting money into a contract.” He continues,
There are multiple classes of property: serialized unique objects like a Stradivarius violin, and registered objects, like houses, cars, and boats, which live on a government register. The same object can be both. For example, cars are both serialized and registered property. In fact, almost everything that is registered is serialized as well. The idea is that you take this object and put it in a smart contract. The goal is to have the owner in smart contracts make changes in the real world to legally transfer ownership.
So back to the Stradivarius violin. If its legal title was assigned to one of Mattereum’s registrars, the violin would be not just a physical asset but a digital asset as well. Then it could be programmatically tokenized and sold to multiple investors. Thus, the contractual restrictions regarding its use could be required and enforced. Rather than staying locked away in a vault, it could be used to bring joy to the ears of many, with Mattereum managing how many times it’s played each year and where.
The same principle applies to artists who want to sell their work to consortiums of investors. They then can manage whether their art will be displayed in public galleries the whole year, the income percentages received by all involved parties, and so on.
Enhancing Value by Recording an Object’s Milestones
Blockchain is very good at managing truth. We set up different mechanisms depending on the value of the goods, the jurisdiction, and what you want to do with them. Gupta adds, “We pull together the supporting documentation around a certain Stradivarius violin, such as X-rays, historical documents, maintenance records, performer notes, and other stuff. We pull that together into basically a digital portfolio of this object. Each piece of data is used for an authenticity indemnity.”
Gupta explains,
This way, you have built-in damages. Specifically, a built-in consequential loss indemnity that is also an elegant representation of actionable thoughts about the objects. Ideally, we want every object to be sold through an insurance vending machine type of process—buyers can simply pay for authentication cover as they purchase. In doing so, we are creating that record that also enhances the value of the violin.
So what else can you do with a Mattereum platform? “We’re very interested in doing climate work on the back of this,” Gupta explains. He continues, “For example, each object can contain emissions data associated with it. In other words, we’re in a position of pushing morality using our platform.”
Formalizing Informal Insurance All Around Us
Gupta explains,
Insurance is critical to commercial transactions. In the real world, everything is interconnected. Everything is also a bit difficult and unpredictable. Rather than having to deal with a messy dispute resolution, we want these insurance policies in place so that if you’ve got, say, a 1 percent defect rate because the world is a little flaky, you spread that 1 percent across all the customers. And when something goes wrong, you just pull from that pool. It is a really simple and straightforward approach like the one used by credit card companies today.
The world is filled with informal insurance. For example, the guy at the hotel who upgrades your room because your room has a bad radiator. That is a mini insurance scheme. He’s got a pool of resources to make decisions. And those little buffers are all over the physical world. There are many of these little schemes where you’ve got a small pool of resources informally controlled. They are handed out to cover the kind of errors in the material world. It’s not that somebody has the discretion to upgrade your room, give you a better table, pour you a free cup of coffee. We are formalizing these systems so you can make them efficient. But it’s formalized and automated.
Conclusion
Among the trickiest, and most exciting, challenges that the explosive development of blockchain technology faces relates to ownership. The questions begin with simpler ones: who owns what exists on the blockchain; some normative questions like who should own what exists on the blockchain? But when we think expansively, we can see that it’s not just our own selves being tokenized for security and efficiency but our actions and transactions as well. When a creator is closer to the object of their creation, they maintain control and cut out the inefficiencies of the proverbial “middleman.” From lawyers, to artists, to asset managers, a range of actors in the global economy stand to gain from the new conceptions of ownership possible with blockchain.
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1V. Gupta. Discussions with the author. 2019.F. Arisandi. 2018. “Mattereum Is Unlike Any Blockchain Projects You’ve Ever Heard of.” https://www.chepicap.com/en/news/5110/mattereum-is-not-the-like-any-of-blockchain-projects-you-ve-ever-heard-of.html. More information about Mattereum is available at https://mattereum.com/. More information about JAAK is available at https://jaak.io/.K. Jackson. Discussions with the author. 2019.More information about Ujo Music is available at https://www.ujomusic.com. More information about Audius is available at https://audius.co/. More information about Open Music is available at http://open-music.org/. EY Global Leader. 2016. “Blockchain Reaction Tech Companies Plan for Critical Mass.” https://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/ey-blockchain-reaction-tech-companies-plan-for-critical-mass/$FILE/ey-blockchain-reaction.pdf. S. Perez. 2017. “Spotify Acquires Blockchain Startup Mediachain to Solve Music’s Attribution Problem.” https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/26/spotify-acquires-blockchain-startup-mediachain-to-solve-musics-attribution-problem/.More information about Nuggets is available at https://nuggets.life.J. Roch. Discussions with the author. 2019.
2V. Gupta. Discussions with the author. 2019.F. Arisandi. 2018. “Mattereum Is Unlike Any Blockchain Projects You’ve Ever Heard of.” https://www.chepicap.com/en/news/5110/mattereum-is-not-the-like-any-of-blockchain-projects-you-ve-ever-heard-of.html. More information about Mattereum is available at https://mattereum.com/. More information about JAAK is available at https://jaak.io/.K. Jackson. Discussions with the author. 2019.More information about Ujo Music is available at https://www.ujomusic.com. More information about Audius is available at https://audius.co/. More information about Open Music is available at http://open-music.org/. EY Global Leader. 2016. “Blockchain Reaction Tech Companies Plan for Critical Mass.” https://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/ey-blockchain-reaction-tech-companies-plan-for-critical-mass/$FILE/ey-blockchain-reaction.pdf. S. Perez. 2017. “Spotify Acquires Blockchain Startup Mediachain to Solve Music’s Attribution Problem.” https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/26/spotify-acquires-blockchain-startup-mediachain-to-solve-musics-attribution-problem/.More information about Nuggets is available at https://nuggets.life.
3V. Gupta. Discussions with the author. 2019.F. Arisandi. 2018. “Mattereum Is Unlike Any Blockchain Projects You’ve Ever Heard of.” https://www.chepicap.com/en/news/5110/mattereum-is-not-the-like-any-of-blockchain-projects-you-ve-ever-heard-of.html. More information about Mattereum is available at https://mattereum.com/. More information about JAAK is available at https://jaak.io/.K. Jackson. Discussions with the author. 2019.More information about Ujo Music is available at https://www.ujomusic.com. More information about Audius is available at https://audius.co/. More information about Open Music is available at http://open-music.org/. EY Global Leader. 2016. “Blockchain Reaction Tech Companies Plan for Critical Mass.” https://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/ey-blockchain-reaction-tech-companies-plan-for-critical-mass/$FILE/ey-blockchain-reaction.pdf. S. Perez. 2017. “Spotify Acquires Blockchain Startup Mediachain to Solve Music’s Attribution Problem.” https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/26/spotify-acquires-blockchain-startup-mediachain-to-solve-musics-attribution-problem/.
4V. Gupta. Discussions with the author. 2019.F. Arisandi. 2018. “Mattereum Is Unlike Any Blockchain Projects You’ve Ever Heard of.” https://www.chepicap.com/en/news/5110/mattereum-is-not-the-like-any-of-blockchain-projects-you-ve-ever-heard-of.html. More information about Mattereum is available at https://mattereum.com/. More information about JAAK is available at https://jaak.io/.K. Jackson. Discussions with the author. 2019.More information about Ujo Music is available at https://www.ujomusic.com. More information about Audius is available at https://audius.co/. More information about Open Music is available at http://open-music.org/. EY Global Leader. 2016. “Blockchain Reaction Tech Companies Plan for Critical Mass.” https://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/ey-blockchain-reaction-tech-companies-plan-for-critical-mass/$FILE/ey-blockchain-reaction.pdf.
5V. Gupta. Discussions with the author. 2019.F. Arisandi. 2018. “Mattereum Is Unlike Any Blockchain Projects You’ve Ever Heard of.” https://www.chepicap.com/en/news/5110/mattereum-is-not-the-like-any-of-blockchain-projects-you-ve-ever-heard-of.html. More information about Mattereum is available at https://mattereum.com/. More information about JAAK is available at https://jaak.io/.K. Jackson. Discussions with the author. 2019.More information about Ujo Music is available at https://www.ujomusic.com. More information about Audius is available at https://audius.co/. More information about Open Music is available at http://open-music.org/.
6V. Gupta. Discussions with the author. 2019.F. Arisandi. 2018. “Mattereum Is Unlike Any Blockchain Projects You’ve Ever Heard of.” https://www.chepicap.com/en/news/5110/mattereum-is-not-the-like-any-of-blockchain-projects-you-ve-ever-heard-of.html. More information about Mattereum is available at https://mattereum.com/. More information about JAAK is available at https://jaak.io/.K. Jackson. Discussions with the author. 2019.More information about Ujo Music is available at https://www.ujomusic.com. More information about Audius is available at https://audius.co/.
7V. Gupta. Discussions with the author. 2019.F. Arisandi. 2018. “Mattereum Is Unlike Any Blockchain Projects You’ve Ever Heard of.” https://www.chepicap.com/en/news/5110/mattereum-is-not-the-like-any-of-blockchain-projects-you-ve-ever-heard-of.html. More information about Mattereum is available at https://mattereum.com/. More information about JAAK is available at https://jaak.io/.K. Jackson. Discussions with the author. 2019.More information about Ujo Music is available at https://www.ujomusic.com.
8V. Gupta. Discussions with the author. 2019.F. Arisandi. 2018. “Mattereum Is Unlike Any Blockchain Projects You’ve Ever Heard of.” https://www.chepicap.com/en/news/5110/mattereum-is-not-the-like-any-of-blockchain-projects-you-ve-ever-heard-of.html. More information about Mattereum is available at https://mattereum.com/. More information about JAAK is available at https://jaak.io/.K. Jackson. Discussions with the author. 2019.
9V. Gupta. Discussions with the author. 2019.F. Arisandi. 2018. “Mattereum Is Unlike Any Blockchain Projects You’ve Ever Heard of.” https://www.chepicap.com/en/news/5110/mattereum-is-not-the-like-any-of-blockchain-projects-you-ve-ever-heard-of.html. More information about Mattereum is available at https://mattereum.com/. More information about JAAK is available at https://jaak.io/.
10V. Gupta. Discussions with the author. 2019.F. Arisandi. 2018. “Mattereum Is Unlike Any Blockchain Projects You’ve Ever Heard of.” https://www.chepicap.com/en/news/5110/mattereum-is-not-the-like-any-of-blockchain-projects-you-ve-ever-heard-of.html. More information about Mattereum is available at https://mattereum.com/.
11V. Gupta. Discussions with the author. 2019.F. Arisandi. 2018. “Mattereum Is Unlike Any Blockchain Projects You’ve Ever Heard of.” https://www.chepicap.com/en/news/5110/mattereum-is-not-the-like-any-of-blockchain-projects-you-ve-ever-heard-of.html.
12V. Gupta. Discussions with the author. 2019.