One of the most depressing emails to hit your inbox is the one informing you that your personal information has been compromised because of a company’s data breach. Fortunately, those emails might be a thing of the past.

That’s if Arie Trouw, co-founder and chief executive officer of the XYO protocol and network, has his way. XYO wants to make the Internet a safer place to navigate with respect to data protection and give control over data back to users.

“The earlier Internet was very sovereign,” Trouw said to me in a recent interview. “Web2 then provided a bunch of really cool features—like Google servers with search capabilities—but it coalesced to a much less sovereign solution where it became a client-server model as opposed to a peer-to-peer model.”

That client-server model can be a great asset for the companies that control it—the asset being, data ownership and the ability to implement advertising—and it’s a model that’s become almost standard practice across today’s Internet. But outside of creating new decentralized systems, it’s difficult for people to regain control of their data from those models.

“Getting back the right to repair iPhones and a lot of these other rights we used to have that have been taken from us slowly over time is becoming more difficult,” Trouw said. “Which is frustrating because I’ve always been interested in doing things myself as opposed to having this client-server relationship with large companies or governments.”

Decentralized and sovereign approach

The focus of XYO is on “proof of origin,” which is the sharing of data between parties, the ability to verify who is sending the data and to see who created it. It’s verifiable peer-to-peer data with an oracle—or independent third-party service—that connects that data to the outside world.

“That decentralized, sovereign approach to data gathering, data storing and data sharing is really what XYO is based on,” Trouw said. “But we realized people don’t just want sovereign data, they want the ability to do something with that data.”

Which is why xyOS was built to help facilitate transparent control and ownership of user data in the form of profiles and preferences that can be used across different applications. With xyOS, the people are in control over the data they want to share and the applications they want to share that data with. For example, if an xyOS user wants to play a game, they’ll be able to control what information and data of theirs is shared with that game. 

“It takes our protocol and other protocols and projects out there and links them together to create a fully sovereign experience for a user in the form of an iOS/Android sort view that gives control and provenance over that data,” Trouw said.

Read more: The Web3 Foundation, Creators of Polkadot, 'Walking the Walk' Towards Full Decentralization 

In this way, XYO aims to live up to the idea of decentralization by putting data ownership back in the hands of the people.

“A lot of people think crypto is only a way to make money, but the original point of Bitcoin was to provide sovereignty for long distance currency and value exchanges,” Trouw said. “XYO in many ways is much more in the spirit of how crypto was originally intended to be viewed.”

The desire for data sovereignty and provenance stands to only increase with the advent of artificial intelligence. As more information, images and content becomes AI generated, the need to demonstrate authenticity will become more valuable. Blockchain solutions like XYO can help power the needed proofs of authenticity, Trouw said.

“If an AI learns how to paint something by looking at an artist’s painting, should that artist get credit for it being a derivative of his work,, or is it a fresh work from the AI?” Trouw said. “A lot of those questions are going to be answered, starting with the provenance of the data, and blockchain will be able to help solve some of those problems.”

But gas fees could prove to be a major obstacle to the widespread deployment of smart contracts that focus on data provenance.

“Paying gas for data points can become very prohibitive very fast,” Trouw said. “It’s one of the reasons why a lot of blockchain hasn’t caught on in the real world—not because it doesn’t work, but because it’s not as cost effective as it needs to be.”

This seems to create a decentralization paradox, whereby the more decentralized a project is, the slower it runs, and the more expensive it becomes. The less decentralized a project, the faster it runs and the cheaper it becomes.

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“You might be able to mine quickly but it won’t be very trusted by other people if only a handful of computers are being used for the mining,” Trouw said.

The issue then becomes how much decentralization is worth trading off in favor of performance.

“You have to rethink the paradigm and you can’t be locked into shared ledgers,” Trouw said. “It’s about how we can use cryptography, ledgers and hashes to make different structures—not necessarily shared ledgers—to make data structures that are just as robust as a shared ledger but are orders of magnitude cheaper and faster.”

lead image: Arie Trouw