Dw3b Part I: End to lock-in business models
Tags: web3, openmodel, startup
Published: 2022-09-10 17:43:51

For a long time now, I have had the dream that one day there will be no passwords or signups and we finally get privacy respecting products that work across siloes resulting in a frictionless user-centric internet experience. The dream is readily achievable if we move data storage, personalization, and authentication to the edge (at the user level)

Over the last 30 years, we have seen great value creation by companies with lock-in business models like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Netflix.  These business models create frictionless experiences as long as users stay within the siloed walled garden resulting in high switching costs and lock-in effects. The deep insight is that the first large user base open model company will greatly disrupt these companies. An open model is an offshoot of web3 ideology featuring, frictionless, composable and user-owned principles. In practice this means that multiple applications would share authentication (crypto sign-in like Metamask/SIWE), data from multiple platforms is stored in user space (preferably in device). The benefits of such an architecture are endless:

- Applications like mint.com which store clear text banking password to show you a dashboard will be simple queries and a static UI
- Privacy barriers will be a thing of the past. Imagine if you had a calorie counter that accessed your transactions to track restaurant and bar expenses. In today's model it is almost a foregone conclusion that you are the Product (i.e if its free your data is being sold). In an open model, the app and the data lives locally and you can rest easy giving transaction column access to the app knowing that your data stays private. 
- Shared auth means death to passwords, and signup screens. Today, weather apps, scores for your team, word of the day and every other service asks you to signup and login. Let us explore a user story to demonstrate the frictionless experience. In this future: Jane decides to buy a coat she saw on her Instagram and clicks on the post to arrive at Zara.com. Zara.com then prompts her Metamask wallet to approve a read request for her data hub. Once approved, Zara.com is able to render a previous Zara jacket jane had purchased on Amazon and the jackets selected by her recommendation engine. After some short browsing, she buys the jacket with 1-click. This story has no signups, logins, walled gardens, or tedious credit card forms. Furthermore, Jane is able to access historical data (past purchases) and recommendations without ceding her privacy to Zara.com.


Since “The best way to predict the future is to create it”, I am building AllSpark, a product approach to delivering this vision. The AllSpark feed is content aggregator that surfaces content from the internet ranked with data from your connected accounts. Data and inference is done in a privacy-first model and crypto sign-in in under development through a partnership with Rownd.com. Our mission is to hit critical velocity with the number of users and turn AllSpark into a platform for web3 builders inline to the heroic work being done by Verida.io, Fission.codes and Inrupt. Checkout the prototype at https://getallspark.co

Stay tuned for Part II from https://dev.to/getallspark