Dataswyft

25/07/2026

Back this September — by popular demand.

Following the wonderful response to previous cohorts, HATLAB Studio is delighted to once again invite Professor Irene Ng to conduct The Economic Stack: Data, Coordination & Ecosystems.

The AI conversation is moving fast. But beneath the headlines lies a more fundamental shift: the economics of coordination.

Why is data different from other assets? Why are ecosystems becoming more important than platforms? How do governance, institutions and incentives shape the AI economy? And what does all this mean for businesses, policymakers, investors and entrepreneurs?

These are the questions the course explores through five live, interactive sessions, drawing on Professor Ng’s research and practical work in market design, digital institutions and the Dataswyft ecosystem.

If you’ve been meaning to join—or if previous participants have recommended the course—this is the next opportunity.

📅 Week commencing: 28 September 2026

Registration is now open. The registration link and full programme are in the comments below.

We look forward to welcoming another cohort of curious minds.

08/07/2026

Article 2: Every Data Intermediary Has Three Decisions to Make HATLAB Studio Conversation with Irene Ng on Data Intermediaries HATLAB Studio: Last week you argued that a data intermediary is not primarily an organisation, but a tool of a network. If that’s the case, what does a data intermediary a...

23/06/2026

The UK Government is consulting on Empowering People Through Data Intermediaries: https://lnkd.in/eFWpbVdg

At HATLAB Studio, we’ve decided to contribute to the conversation through a series of interviews and discussions with members of the Studio community and contributors to the Dataswyft Wallet & Network.

Our goal is simple:

To gather diverse perspectives, identify areas of agreement and disagreement, and develop a thoughtful response informed by both theory and practice.

We’ll be exploring questions such as:
• What is a data intermediary?
• What problem should it solve?
• What makes it trustworthy?
• Who should govern it?
• How should AI agents interact with it?
• What value should flow back to individuals?
• What regulatory framework is needed?

We begin with what we believe is the foundational question:

What is a data intermediary?

In the HAT and Dataswyft world, our starting point is that a data intermediary is not primarily an organisation. It is a tool of a network.

The reason is in the word itself.

An intermediary sits between two parties.

In personal data ecosystems, that means mediating both the relationship between data sources and individuals, and the relationship between individuals and the organisations or agents that wish to access their data.

Over the coming weeks we’ll elaborate on this, refine it and learn from the perspectives of the Studio community.

The first article is now live:

🔗 https://lnkd.in/euZ_Ue8v

We’d love to hear your thoughts.

04/06/2026

One of the reasons I created the foundational learning course, The Economic Stack: Data, Coordination and Ecosystems, is that over the last 15 years I’ve noticed that many people working in technology have a technology-centric view of the world. That’s understandable—but when it comes to data, it can be limiting.

Data is different.

Data is not simply a technical asset. It is information about people—their attributes, behaviours, relationships, and choices. And because data is about people, it has profound economic and social implications.

Many people who think they understand data understand it as a static asset—a resource to be collected, stored, aggregated, and analysed. This is the “big data” view of value.

But that is only one type of value.

I often think of this as the difference between a bottle of water and a river.

A bottle of water has value. You can own it, store it, analyse it, and sell it.

But a river has a different kind of value. It connects places. It enables transport. It irrigates farms. It supports ecosystems. It can be channelled to generate power. Its value comes not from what it contains, but from how it flows.

Data is similar.

The value of a dataset sitting in a database is often far smaller than the value created when data flows between people, organisations, and markets, enabling coordination, trust, exchange, and innovation.

This is why understanding data requires more than technical expertise. It requires understanding economics, coordination, markets, incentives, governance, trust, and human behaviour.

The Economic Stack explores how data creates economic value, how coordination emerges between actors, and how ecosystems form around the exchange of data, goods, services, and trust. It is designed for leaders who need to shape policy, governance, strategy, and innovation in a data-driven economy.

The next cohort runs 22–26 June 2026, 2:00–4:00 pm BST (UK time). The course is fully online and participation is free, because I’m interested in understanding what level of economic and data literacy today’s technology leaders need in order to shape effective policy, governance, and market design.

Data is not just information. It is the foundation of economic coordination.

If you’re working at the intersection of technology, data, and society, I’d love to have you join us. (Link in comments.)

29/05/2026

09/04/2026

This is an important step forward.

Ecosystem design is too often treated as something that “just emerges.” In reality, it is a capability—one that can be learned, practiced, and refined.

Great to see the first SEE-Me cohort complete the foundational programme and begin applying these ideas to real-world challenges.

We need many more ecosystem architects trained to design markets and systems that work—at scale, and for more people.

SEE-ME—Systems for Economic Empowerment through Market and Ecosystem Design—is a learning-by-design program in which participants learn and design markets and ecosystems that enable people, firms, and communities who are currently invisible to participate meaningfully in the modern, post-digital...

11/03/2026

Why haven’t standards alone solved data portability? Because moving verified information between organisations brings legal and operational complexity along for the ride.

This post explains why **self-custody** is the missing layer that makes trust truly portable, like shipping containers did for global trade.

Why Standards Alone Are Not Enough Every major economic expansion has followed the same pattern: reduce the cost of moving something important. Roads reduced the cost of moving goods across land. Railways connected national markets. Shipping containers standardised global trade. The internet s

14/01/2026

In 2025, digital identity systems were tested in the real world — not just in pilots or controlled environments.

What we learned was simple but important: strong digital identity depends less on features and interfaces, and more on the underlying infrastructure. How data is held, how rules are enforced, and how systems work together all matter when trust needs to scale.

This article explores what 2025 revealed about digital identity, and why long-term trust starts with the right foundations.

👉 Read more in the full article:
https://dataswyft.com/network-news/digital-identity-after-the-hype-what-2025-revealed-about-infrastructure

2025 was a revealing year for digital identity (ID). Not because of a single breakthrough, but because many ideas were finally tested outside controlled pilots and into real operating environments. Digital IDs faced distribution. Systems encountered scale. Schemes encountered governance. Cross-orga

08/01/2026

As we begin 2026, one idea stands out: trust is infrastructure. It is the bedrock of markets. It enables safety in information exchange and reduces the congestion between supply and demand of information.

In a digital economy that spans organizations, borders and services, trust is the infrastructure layer and the foundation of interoperability.

The Dataswyft Wallet Suite encapsulates trust as infrastructure through the mobility of trusted information from data sources to data subjects to data receivers, conducted through - self sovereign, self custody data rails - so that physical, real world trusted relationships can be translated into digital ones directly without being locked in into a service or platform.

This video reflects an evolving perspective on how responsible digital systems can benefit from greater use of data — with privacy, verifiability and interoperability at their core.

Watch the video to explore how digital trust infrastructure can catalyze markets and enable global value exchange.

Video: https://youtu.be/D5iwuWthyDM?si=bsi_zpqSFjGfqmGU

The Dataswyft Wallet Suite is the core infrastructure of the Dataswyft Network — a global trust fabric for secure, compliant, and peer-to-peer data exchange....