A former executive director at the banking giant JP Morgan Chase, Amber Baldet has spoken on decentralised applications in arguing that “when people use decentralized applications (dApps), they should be able to focus more on what the app does than what’s under the hood.”
Baldet was one of the key members in launching Quorum, an Ethereum-based blockchain platform for business owners and has now become well-known for her stance against ‘single chain maximalism’. The co-founder of Clovyr, a platform that allows users to develop several different blockchain-based applications, has previously stated that “this decade will be remembered for surveillance capitalism.”
Data storage
For those that don’t know, maximalists think that the cryptocurrency they support is the only real and legitimate case for blockchain technology. According to the former JP Morgan executive, this type of thinking can impede the potential progress that wide applications of distributed ledger technology could allow us to make.
Baldet spoke to the management team at ConsenSys where she confirmed:
“Companies are hoovering up data at an increasing pace. Many of them have decided that in order to run machine learning programs, more data is always better, but these data lakes create a lot of technical risk for them. And now that technical risk is creating legal, regulatory and monetary risk as well.”
She then went on to say:
“It’s also becoming [more challenging] for smaller companies to compete with larger companies within their industry vertical. Increasingly, juggernauts like Google are amassing so much industry specific data that they can credibly compete with the best-in-class in every industry. Companies are realizing that they’re going to need to collaborate in order to derive the business insights that help them compete.”
When questioned about her views regarding surveillance capitalism, Baldet affirmed that:
“Lots of people that seem really focused on “privacy tech” these days need to understand the difference between what is private (free from intrusion) and what is confidential (authorized access, with expectation of consensual use). I am okay with vendors having the data that is created as I use their service, but I’m not necessarily okay with them selling it to a hedge fund or ad-tech company.”