Notes from Professor Irene Ng’s panel discussions at Point Zero Forum 2025, Zürich, May 5-7 2025
Our CEO was in Zurich to speak at 2 sessions:
Switzerland’s Role in Shaping the Future of Global Public Digital Infrastructure
Working “Above Borders”; Governance. architecture and standards of digital public infrastructure
She gave us her notes from her panel presentations and we summarised them below.
Hi I’m Irene Ng, a Professor at Warwick University, fellow at the Alan Turing Institute and a market design economist managing various data economy private equity investment funds. I’m also the Group CEO of Dataswyft.
Dataswyft’s Above Borders Data Distribution Network
Dataswyft operates a global distributed data network ‘above borders’, providing data empowerment technology made up of a self-custodied data server attached to a data wallet, that enables peer-to-peer data portability and interoperability. The technology was created and informed by more than US$55m of research across ten U.K. universities.
Our data empowerment technology can be owned by any legal person on the planet, e.g. a person, business or government, and can be provisioned within a few seconds at a cost of less than $2 a year. It provides a digital public infrastructure that serves the global public; by enabling anyone to create, share and receive proofs across borders, as they are the controller, processor and intellectual property rights owner of their own data.
Of course, just because our technology enables data and proofs to be portable and interoperable across borders, that doesn’t mean that we are not governed. We understand that what we have created can be harmful if used wrongly, (think about being scammed for your money AND your data), so the original research team formed the HAT Community Foundation to provide robust governance. The foundation owns one guardian share of Dataswyft and governs its purpose, working alongside standards institutions.
Catalysing a Three-Sided Market for Data and Proofs
Through the CheckD Dataswyft Wallet, we distribute data and ‘proofs’ across a three-sided data market consisting of:
1. Proof issuers that verify data or integrate with other sources of data to issue proof templates, e.g. ‘I am a resident of this apartment building’ or ‘I have this academic qualification’, and distributes them through the wallet to the second side of the market, other individuals or micro firms – proof holders.
2. Proof holders own their data in their wallet and adopt the proof templates to ‘present and push’ their data, (much like credit card payments), sharing the data and licensing it to the third side of our market – proof receivers. Proof holders can see where to use their proofs from within the wallet.
3. Proof receivers are part of our global merchant network, similar to a credit card network. For example, proof of identity can be received by the apartment building or proof of qualifications by an employer. We expect to expand our merchant network to seven countries by the end of the year.
We believe that the digital economy above borders will be catalysed by a growing consumer market for proofs, transacted in real time at a similar speed as payments. Identity proof, a $13Bn market, (growing at a 13% CAGR), is but one of many proofs – of prescription, of allergies, of age, etc., many that do not even need identifying information. A strong proof market would drive payment markets to be wider, (because proofs can be taken across borders), deeper (because proofs can have multi-layered information) and safer (because proofs reduce false positives).
Challenges in Coordinating the Market
From a market design perspective, our market depends on three elements - safety to transact, minimal congestion between supply and demand, and thickness, a form of critical mass. Our market does not have an issue with safety. The regulator of our network, the HAT Community Foundation, serves as the standard bearer of the proofs issued. We don’t have interoperability or portability challenge as a thickness issue either, as there are plenty of issuers for low-assurance proofs to transfer data peer-to-peer, e.g. to fill in simple forms. The challenge we have is that of congestion in high-assurance proofs – not technical or network congestion, but market congestion – where we have merchants that want to receive high assurance proof, but there aren’t enough issuers to issue the proofs.
High-assurance proofs require high-assurance sources of truth. Whether financial data or machine data, large enterprises and government agencies hold the truth of behaviours, attributes or outcomes. In our experience it is not necessary that the sources of truth are the issuer of proofs. Indeed, in our market, frequently they are not, because proofs often contain more than one source of truth, for example, a proof of a CV for a job have several qualification sources from different universities.
Our merchants, the receivers of proofs, are asking for more high-assurance proofs and are willing to pay for them. However, many of our issuers cannot issue because the supply of data is inadequate. The perceived complexity for sources of truth to give data back to their customers is causing market failure for high-assurance proofs, and in my opinion, hobbling the digital economy. We can of course, continue to operate the market with low to medium-assurance proofs. There are plenty around. However, the market failure for high-assurance proofs hurts governments’ own economies and it drives the market into the arms of the big-tech platforms. I urge initiatives in digital public infrastructure to include the discussion of government and enterprise data for use by the market – with suitable guardrails, of course.
The Public Good of Data and Proof Distribution
Today, we use our technology to create a private market because the market inefficiency of proofs generates economic rents. However, the market we have built can just as easily be used to provide a public good, e.g. governments using proofs to coordinate identity between their agencies. In fact, I would argue that because the global private market is so large, the cost to governments of using the global digital public infrastructure is far lower than trying to create the infrastructure themselves. I would suggest that governments, (such as Switzerland), could even take on a role in the market to be a supply-side coordinator of sources of truth for their nation state, or even for the region. Many sources of truths do not even know, or value, that they are a source of truth. They have no incentive to open-up their data. However, if their rights are upheld by a government institution, and the use of their data could create a new revenue stream, the market for high-assurance proofs could thrive and that, in turn, would drive the future digital economy.
The Role of Nation States in the Above Borders Market
I believe that we are now seeing the tail end of an analogue nationalist age and the beginning of a digital age that is ‘above borders. Nation states must ask themselves what role they see for themselves in this digital economy. The voice of the global public shows a clear preference for identity to be coordinated by the market, identifiable only through a now ubiquitous mobile number or social media account. Digital identity issued by nation states continue to face challenges in distribution and even more so in adoption, not only because national identity is often contentious and polarising, but also because it does not travel well across borders. If nation states truly want a role in the future digital economy, perhaps it’s time they consider having a role in the market.
For more information about how Dataswyft provides one app to prove everything! And how that simplifies information handling for the proof economy, go to the CheckD Dataswyft Wallet. If you want to join the team, or the network, please reach out!