Today we saw the impressive “Hindenburg” moment for Matic Network and many other coins from Binance’s launchpad.

While many are highlighting the breathtaking “Christmas Tree” chart pattern and decrying Matic’s team as liars, I want to focus on what drove the initial interest in the project.

At its core, Matic is around developer enablement, being a second-layer solution that facilitated dApp development using adapted version of Plasma with PoS based side chains.

Looking closer, you can see that Matic placed an emphasis on going beyond payments and exchange of value. They wanted to facilitate the payment and exchange of data.

Digital identity, personal data, and financial services such as lending are all touchpoints for channeling the flow and collection of data.

In a sense, if data is the new oil, then Matic wanted to be a refinery — so, let’s expand upon that value proposition for the new economy.

Oil has had many uses for centuries, but two primary innovations—electricity and the combustion engine—drove global demand for oil and its by-products to new heights.

Crude oil itself wasn’t the driving force of industrialization — only once oil is refined and used to empower other industrial driving forces do we see its value and how it rapidly changed the world, thus driving demand for oil.

Much in the same way, the combustion engine, electricity, and transistors served as platforms for what came next and how society changed — they enabled more, they were demanded more.

We’ve previously talked about this progression of industrial revolutions driven by innovation platforms

 — which means we’re at the start of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

And what’s driving this new industrialization?

Data.

Like oil, innovations impacting data have enabled the manipulation of data to perform tasks and provide insights, which in turn has driven demand for more data.

However, as more and more data is collected, consumers are increasingly concerned with the quality and quantity of data collected about them and how it is being used.

If data is the new oil, then trust is the ultimate currency that drives this new data economy.

Those organizations that build unwavering trust with their consumers will have the best platform for long-term success. We are at the dawn of the digital age, where the acquisition and consumption of consumer data by organizations are critical to the success and staying power of the organization.

The combination of three growing forces—Moore’s Law (computing power), Metcalfe’s Law (network expansion), and Gilder’s Law (large, inexpensive storage and processing in the cloud)—has recently created a new economy. In the new economy, the value for organizations does not lie solely in the products and services that they offer today, but in the ability to continuously improve consumer experience to retain loyalty tomorrow. Data, code, and devices are symbiotic, where advances in any one of these three will drive up demand for all.

But what’s just as important as the law of exponential growth is its complement: technology’s unrelenting march to the asymptotic ‘free’. As technological capacity doubles in a period, the cost of an equivalent capacity necessarily halves. The essential insight here is that base level technological commodities are constantly approaching the point of ‘nearly free’. It’s a tough logic to consider, but the growth in the availability of computer technologies speaks for itself. The computing capabilities that were once labelled as ‘emerging technologies’ are now tacked onto appliances as trivial as refrigerators and shipping containers, and phones once lauded as breakthroughs are now given away free on contract. The only reason we keep paying for things is because our our expectations grow just as fast as technology becomes cheaper. Lifestyle creep at its macroeconomic finest.

But this story isn’t to deride the tenets of consumerism. Really, this is about considering a new grasp of economics in a world where the scarcity that forces economic agents to make choices is constantly threatened. Digital technology has no desire to be scarce. Digital commodities are naturally anarchic, with a natural propensity to be sharded, scattered, and duplicated. It’s a romantic battle: bits and bytes breaking free from the tenacious bounds of orthodox economics. Chaos is its natural state.