Jon Stokes believes blockchain tech has the opportunity to take us from a world where individual corporations build their siloed users tables to a world where the entire Internet shares a single users table.

In place of a decentralized network of user data silos connected by APIs, there’s a single decentralized user data store accessible via an open protocol and a decentralized network of storage nodes. So the identity-hosting blockchain represents decentralization at the datastore implementation layer, and recentralization at the datastore access layer.

What would this produce? Jon envisions this:

Moving identity on-chain, and thereby removing the possibility of users-table-centric network effects, completely up-ends the entire landscape of API-based, access-controlled interoperability that the present Internet is built on. All of the non-technical market and political dynamics around users table size, leverage, and risk suddenly go out the window.