Opinion by: Michael O’Rourke, founder of Pocket Network and CEO of Grove
Open data is currently a major contributor toward building a global emerging tech economy, with an estimated market of over $350 billion. Open data sources often rely, however, on centralized infrastructure, contrary to the philosophy of autonomy and censorship resistance.
To realize its potential, open data must shift to decentralized infrastructure. Once open data channels start using a decentralized and open infrastructure, multiple vulnerabilities for user applications will be solved.
Open infrastructure has many use cases, from hosting a decentralized application (DApp) or a trading bot to sharing research data to training and inference of large language models (LLMs). Looking closely into each helps us better understand why leveraging decentralized infrastructure for open data is more utilitarian than centralized infrastructure.
Affordable LLM training and inference
The launch of the open-source AI DeepSeek, which wiped out $1 trillion from