Inside the Radical Move of Pets Earning Money (and we don’t mean Instagram stars.)
What is Pawtocol?
Pawtocol is a global online community of pet lovers who are disrupting the pet industry by leveraging blockchain technology to construct an ecosystem that benefits pet parents, veterinarians, manufacturers and retailers. By combining blockchain, AI, and IoT technologies, the Pawtocol ecosystem will allow all participants to make better use of the vast amount of data generated within the space. Pet parents can earn a direct income by sharing their data with veterinarians, retailers or manufacturers, who can then use that data to improve their operations.
What is UPI?
The platform’s ERC-20 token, Universal Pet Income, provides two important benefits.
First, it represents purchasing power as users can transact with other participants natively within the platform. This means that pet owners can pay their vet bill or their local retailer directly without the hassle of converting UPI to fiat. Perhaps more importantly, the advent of smart contracts in combination with Pawtocol’s IoT-enabled hardware can greatly simplify certain P2P interactions such as dog walking. For example, the platform’s IoT dog tag can trigger payment via smart contract when a walk is complete.
Second, it is both the medium and incentive by which a pet’s data is converted into financial value. The data that is generated during a pet’s interaction with the world is extremely valuable to healthcare providers, manufacturers, and retailers. For example:
- Providers can improve their quality of service by having broader, more seamless access to pet data.
- Manufacturers can better allocate R&D resources or more quickly respond to quality control issues if consumers share their data.
- Retailers can improve customer loyalty or more effectively compete with larger retailers by knowing more about the products of their patron’s purchase.
What is Data Monetization?
At this point, you may be saying to yourself, “these data are already changing hands in exactly the way you’ve described.” You’re absolutely right. However, there’s one key difference. The value these data convey is being usurped by third parties like Google or Amazon, and it’s that very same value that has propelled each to top of the industry.
The Pawtocol platform will correct this imbalance by distributing it’s value further down the data supply chain, to the entities that actually generate it in the first place: our pets.
Why should we care?
You don’t have to look good in a tin-foil hat to be passionate about data ownership, nor do you need to be a Nobel-laureate to understand why it matters. If data is the world’s most valuable asset (it is) and half of the population lives off less than $5.50 per day (it does, according to the World Bank), then the fair allocation of data’s worth is something worth paying attention to. Sadly, the situation for pets is even more dismal. According to the ASPCA, in the U.S. alone, over 1.5 million pets are euthanized each year. To an economist, this is a simple problem of resource allocation: there are insufficient resources to support these additional 1.5 million pets each year.
By rerouting a portion of the wealth created by pet data back to pets and their owners, Pawtocol will enable pet lovers the world over to do more for the community and the animals they love.
