The richest 1% now owns more wealth than the rest of the people on the planet. (World Bank, 2015)

The fifth industrial revolution will bring, alongside its benefits, a host of new social challenges, including a high likelihood of mass unemployment resulting from the automation of enterprise. This means that even more people will find themselves out of work and without a source of income.

Either fearing unrest by the unemployed or moved by nobler motives, the rich are considering providing an “unconditional basic income” to everyone in need. But, with the help of the “universal basic asset”, there are also other ways for active people to earn money.

Caste divisions

In 2015, just 62 individuals had the same wealth as 3.6 billion people — the bottom half of humanity.

That’s a stark difference in welfare! For those who believe that everyone has equal opportunities to earn money, this does not seem so bad. Unfortunately, belief is not enough to get rich, and the statistics are not encouraging.

The Institute for the Future (US) conducted a study and found that, in Denmark, the chances of reaching top-quintile income levels during one’s lifetime are virtually equal for children born in poor families and for those born into wealthy ones.

“The chance for the same children living in Charlotte, Columbus, or Atlanta is 5%, and for those from Memphis only 2.8%. This is largely because of the differences in access to public assets,” — says Marina Gorbis, executive director at the Institute for the Future.

Will novel concepts and technology help those striving to change their lives?

Among the many different views of scholars, politicians and researchers grappling with this problem, two options emerge as the most realistic: Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) and Unconditional Basic Asset (UBA).

Unconditional Basic Income (UBI)

The social concept of a universal basic income involves the payment of a certain amount of money to every member of a given society. This could be done not so much by the government, as by socially responsible companies.

UBI is, for example, supported by Mark Zuckerberg, who made his fortune by showing advertisements to Facebook users. He is willing to pay everyone a fixed amount of money while continuing to use their data.

Many such experiments are taking place around the world, although OECD data suggests that, in most cases, the implementation of such pay-outs actually leads to an increased tax burden on the employed, and still fails to solve social problems.

In addition, the sums paid out turn out to be insufficient to help people increase their quality of life. This is because receiving money does not, in itself, change peoples’ mindset and habits; instead, they simply start spending more, as evidenced by stories of lottery winners — they do not typically found their own business empires, but, as a rule, soon squander the riches thrust upon them. So it seems that a universal basic income is not for everyone. What’s to be done?

Sometimes it’s better to give someone a fishing rod than a fish.

Unconditional Basic Asset (UBA)

The Institute for the Future offers, as a solution for the inequality problem, the concept of the Universal Basic Asset (Universal Basic Asset manifesto), meaning a fundamental set of resources that we should strive to give everyone access to.

What are assets? In economics, assets are resources controlled by a person or a company as a result of past events, which the company expects to provide economic benefits in the future.

The UBA concept includes three asset classes: private, public and open assets.

Private assets are resources that we own individually. Housing, land, personal money, and retirement accounts fall into this category.

Public assets include resources collectively owned by the public that are managed by different types of government bodies on their behalf. They can include everything from national parks to mineral and cultural resources, to critical parts of physical or digital infrastructure.

Open assets are resources that are owned and managed neither privately nor by a government. They are open to anyone and governed by a defined group, such as British Common Law or Wikipedia.

The example of Scandinavian countries, where many public resources like education, healthcare and transportation are freely available, shows that this approach works in principle.

British researchers have reached a similar conclusion: Universal basic services could work better than basic income to combat the ‘rise of the robots’. The state should make shelter, food, travel and internet access available to all, free at the point of use, rather than focusing on redistributing money, a team at University College London’s Institute for Global Prosperity (IGP) says.

Digital assets must be smart assets

We can observe a tendency towards digitalization across all asset categories, where either the asset itself is fully digital, or the use of physical assets is organized with the aid of digital technologies.

Digitalized assets are more easily controlled, transferred and divided.

Everyone says that information is the new oil of XXI century. But it seems so far, only companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and other giants in the IT industry have been enjoying the economic advantages, not the actual creators and owners of data. For example, the named companies sell user data to advertisers whose marketing strategies are made based on the bought data.

So it turns out that ordinary users are involved in marketing research unconsciously and for free, meanwhile products and services are sold back to them by companies who bought their data. This situation is reminiscent of the Wild West –anyone who is able to find a gold mine, can extract enormous profits.

Lawmakers are concerned about this problem, but they didn’t find the most rational and efficient way, trying to impose regulations under the guise of protecting personal data only creates new barriers to business, on the other hand, property rights of personal data and the rights of content creators remain unprotected.

A good example of revenue sharing is the healthcare sector, where compensating patients for their participation in clinical trials is a long-standing practice. In effect, people are in some way compensated for providing their medical data to pharmacology companies.

Clinical trials usually involve hundreds of patients, and a company can sign contracts with each of them. But how can broader categories of people be handled?

In many cases, the P2P interaction model is the most effective, lacking a unified resource distribution centre.

The use of blockchain may solve this problem by turning every asset into a Smart Asset and automatically building a chain of smart contracts determining asset usage conditions and the corresponding compensation.

How does asset tokenization affect UBA?

A Smart Asset brings two sides together.

— Firstly, the introduction of a Smart Assets provides owners of valuable but previously illiquid assets with access to capital sources. For example, small farms will find it easier to receive a loan backed by the future harvest — banks are usually not interested in such transactions, but the P2P marketplace may be effective here.

— Secondly, the move to Smart Assets allows for the quick and easy purchase of tokens. This significantly reduces barriers to entry for many types of investment, meaning that more people will be able to receive a passive income.

This way, through the use of blockchain technology and unconditional basic assets, BANKEX offers a fishing rod to those willing to improve their lives, including small businesses and entrepreneurs.