2 Keys to Competitive Advantage for Crypto-Marketers

TL;DR: In a blockchain world, competitive advantage will go to those who get insights fastest.

I’ve been thinking and reading about AI and analytics a lot recently, particularly as it relates to the blockchain world.

This includes David Kelnar’s The State of AI 2017: What Matters Most and The fourth industrial revolution: a primer on Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Also, I’m listening to AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together and reading Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

My hypothesis has been that, as more and more data moves to a blockchain, the game starts to change, moving from “who owns the data?” to “who can get insight from the data?”

There are plenty of crypto-unique use cases (peer-to-peer payments, securities, collectibles, and utilities) where crypto-native competitors/markets don’t have to worry about the massive advantage in “Big Data” and AI that the FANGs (and their Chinese equivalents) have. In effect, all of them are starting from the same point.

For example, Storj, Sia, Filecoin, and Arweave all play in the decentralized storage space.

All of them are public blockchains which means that anyone and everyone has access to whatever data is available about what is going on at the base layer of the network. That is not the case for AWS, Google, and Azure, for example.

So, what happens?

First, Wallets/CX Appear to be Critical

Well, for one, I think there will be a battle for additional data that gives a competitive advantage. This will come from earning customer attention via the customer experience layer (i.e. wallet/tool people use to interact with the network).

Whichever wallet has the best overall CX for the end user (and there will be different use cases), will have the right to ask for permission for data from customers. OpenBazaar, for example, is doing this and seeing great success because of the trust they have earned.

If an app developer (say Radar Relay in the 0x eco-system) becomes dominant and gains permission, any data from that proprietary relationship would make a difference.

However, what’s important to remember is that, unlike with LinkedIn or Uber, you can leave at any time and all of your personal information and transaction history goes with you.

Time to Insight is what Matters Most

The other part of the equation (and this is particularly true as new entrants enter an eco-system) is who can make sense of all of the data FIRST. It’s a speed/time-to-insight challenge.

One of the projects I am particularly excited about is Endor (disclosure: advisor) precisely because it offers the potential to accelerate = time-to-insight.

While Endor is a new crypto project (they successfully raised $45mm in their March ICO) , it is based on proven technology. Utilizing research from MIT called Social Physics, Endor’s existing enterprise business already has customers like Coca Cola who testify to the effectiveness of the approach.

The crypto version, the Endor Protocol, enables integration of various prediction engines, automatically enables integration of data source, and compensates providers of data and engines are tokens. When all is said and done, it proposes to make enterprise-grade predictive analytics capabilities available to anyone at a far lower cost compared to existing alternatives. You won’t need 7-figure salary data scientists, for example.

Called by some the “Google for Predictive Analytics” Endor offers the possibility of getting accurate predictions for human behavior in minutes versus months.

And they can do it more securely because they can run the prediction engine on encrypted data.

When the vision takes shape (hopefully), you will be able to upload your data (securely) and then type into a search box (much like you type into Google today) asking questions about “who is likely to buy a Latte next month if I offer a 20% discount?”

I remember at Sprinklr that we spent months on this very question and I had an MBA working full-time on the question of “what is the next logical product for a customer to buy given the ones they already have?”

We met with some success, but it took a LOT of effort.

I’m going to be spending some time with Endor (based in Israel) to dive into exactly how this all works, but they key idea is that human behavior overall has a mathematical, and therefore a predictable, foundation to it and that behavior drives market and purchases.

Max Tegmark, author of Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence writes that “real-world strategy problems are typically complicated by human psychology,” but if there is a mathematical underpinning to how we act and Endor can do it quickly on encrypted data, that’s going to be really exciting and useful.

This will mean that anyone (really anyone) can get high quality predictions from various prediction search engines (automatically being synced by the Endor prediction protocol), operating on a variety of (encrypted) data sources. that is a game-changer in the time-to-insight race.

This will mean that anyone (really anyone) can get high quality predictions from a prediction search engine (like Endor), that is a game-changer in the time-to-insight race.

The Industrialization of Data

Crypto-marketers are going to need to look at the already available data on public blockchains and start to think about the insights that are sitting out there, unrealized, within the vast (and growing) data oceans getting created.

Then, it’s about figuring out how to ask the right questions to extract (and act) upon those insights as quickly as possible.

In the past, I wrote about the Industrialization of Data. That’s already happening, of course, but now we’re seeing it evolve in the blockchain world as well.

More on this topic to come.

That’s something I can predict with 95% certainty.