The world is drowning in data. Why don’t we trade it like on a stock exchange?

The digital revolution is flooding the world with data. By 2025, an astounding 175 zettabytes – that’s 175 trillion gigabytes – of new data is expected to be generated annually, a fivefold increase on 2018. Much of that data will end up sitting idle on servers and hard drives –unused, unanalyzed, and, perhaps worst of all, unshared.

Data is valuable only when it is in the right hands: One person’s meaningless statistic can be another person’s gold. If that other person is, say, an epidemiologist, a climate scientist, or an emergency worker in a natural disaster, the value of shared data can be measured in lives.

Read more