



We have been following very closely what is happening in the blockchain space for a few years now. The main promise of the technology is to enable decentralized consensus. Consensus is an essential part of our lives, from simple agreements with friends, business decisions to political or legal norms. Even social norms are unconsciously shaped by collective consensus.

Until now, blockchains have mainly been used to create a new electronic cash system, like in Bitcoin, where a decentralized network validates how owns what amount. But such consensus can be achieved about pretty much anything else than can be stored or communicated electronically.

This is what early pioneers have uncovered as they started building new generation market places for about anything, ranging from energy to medical care. We have seen a few teams working on the decentralization of consumer data and decided to pilot the technology.





We partnered with Insights.network, one of leading teams focused on the creation of a seamless data exchange on the EOS blockchain.

Their technology enables consumers to share and monetize their data like answers to surveys or tech-harvested data with full control over what they share with whom. Monetization is done via a “utility-token” called Instar, which can be exchanged for any fiat currency.

The data remains the sole propriety of the consumers and it is secured through military-grade encryption. On the other hand, data requesters get proof of key consumer information like age and gender through cryptography without having to get any of personally-identifiable data, in full compliance with GDPR.





Anyways, back to our question. We asked a simple purchase intent question on an imaginary new sun-block which we had already used in previous contextual R&D research.

In 8 hours we collected over 400 responses in exchange of 200 Instar (currently worth ~ 4$).

We observe significant differences between the context research we did a few years ago and the new pilot on the blockchain. These differences may be explained by the different geographic coverage and the psychographic profile of the respondents (much more skewed towards early adopters in the blockchain context). There is no way to know precisely what is driving the differences at this point as the software is currently in Beta and quite frankly very rudimentary. But we expect the team will have integrated the “matching algorithm” they have developed by the time the main-net is launched in Q4 2018, which will allow the targeting of specific countries and socio-demographic profiles.





So, we don’t really know what to conclude.

But it doesn’t really matter: the benefits of the technology are clear, the technology is here to stay, so we’d better get onboard earlier rather than later!