Web3 users will control their data, says Oasis Ecosystem head

Binance Labs, the venture capital arm of the Binance crypto exchange, is to contribute to the Oasis Foundation’s $200m ecosystem fund with a focus on DeFi, NFTs, metaverse, data DAO and privacy apps.

“Those (areas) will generate, and have demonstrated the ability to generate, strong momentum,” said Linda Lu, director of Ecosystem at Oasis.

Lu told Coin Rivet she welcomes the Oasis Network’s “scalability and privacy-preserving features”, as well as its ability to advance Web3 development, as reasons for backing the project.

Lu elaborated upon the company’s dedication to Web3 development and explained that, in Web2, end-users were essentially part of the product.

“In Web2, the company managed to contribute tons of data to help improve the product in exchange for better user experience (whether it’s really better or not is still up for debate), say more curated content or more targeted ads,” she said.

“As data becomes more valuable, it raises a number of questions around data ownership, value extraction, and the risks and usability issues inherent with data use at scale.

“For instance, value is not evenly distributed between enterprises and product contributors such as end users or data providers and oftentimes, ‘better user experience’ is the only thing we get.”

Web3 is, according to Lu, changing that by empowering individuals and end-users and “giving users the right as to how they want their data to be consumed”.

“No entity can take users’ data for granted in Web3,” she commented.

“There will be a new economy in Web3, where individuals can own their data, and control how it’s used.

“Hence, value extraction will also be shifted under Web3 where contributors will be rewarded vs. being largely controlled by enterprises.”

NFT to be fully integrated into metaverse

Lu also talked about Oasis’ contribution and plans when it comes to the NFTs and metaverse.

She said she thinks NFTs shall be fully integrated into metaverse… “the NFT we bought is not just a status symbol where we use it for our social media avatars etc”.

“There are and will be a lot more utility of NFTs beyond that, like how NFTs are integrated with crypto gaming, where some sort of skins or swords you bought on an NFT marketplace can be immediately used in some crypto games to allow you to move up the levels quickly,” she said.

She added NFTs were more connected with the real world, like NFTs representing membership, financial assets or real estate, and this would require privacy protection.

“People might be happy about sharing the ownership status with the public but they might not necessarily want to share the personal information or data that is underneath to prove ownership,” she said.

Lu added that within the Oasis Network, there exists “a support for confidential compute specifically targeting use cases like that among others”.

“We have received overwhelming interest from our community developers, founders and entrepreneurs that want to build on Oasis and we have few native DeFi protocols as well as a few NFT and gaming projects in the making,” she said.