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Berlin, Nov. 30, 2017: The Berlin, Germany-based IOTA Foundation has launched ‘Data Marketplace’, with the aim of maintaining a “true decentralized data marketplace” that opens up the data silos that keep data limited to a few entities, as is the case today.
All of us know that data is one of the most imperative ingredients in the machine economy and the connected world. Writing in Medium, Founder of IOTA, David Sonstebo explained data was “the new oil”. The sheer magnitude and influence data has and increasingly will have on our society automatically come with huge business opportunities in the tens of billions in the next few years. Trading data will be a mutually beneficial exercise that both boost innovation for companies as well as create entirely new revenue streams of data that would otherwise just go to waste.
The largest obstacle preventing the fulfillment of the grandeur envisaged by ‘Big Data’ is the fact that the overwhelming majority of data remains locked in what is called ‘Data Silos’. Data silos do not, or at best very rarely, share its data outside its own closed environment. This leads to enormous quantities of wasted data, often over 99% is lost to the void, (source: McKinsey 2015) that could potentially contain extremely valuable information if allowed to flow freely in data streams that create an open and decentralized data lake that is accessible to any compensating party.
There are several reasons for this cumbersome and wasteful status quo, says David. On the one hand data wants to be free in the sense that storage and transmission of it costs less and less, on the other hand the large quantities of data is extremely valuable and is not free to generate. “This is where the IOTA protocol becomes necessary to unlock this gigantic potential.”
IOTA’s unique public Distributed Ledger architecture called ‘Tangle’ is a form of Directed Acyclic Graph where every transaction and data transmission validates two previous ones, which again reference their two previous ones and so on. This means that validation of the network is an intrinsic property of using the network and thus is no longer decoupled from the usage of the network, as is the case in regular blockchain architecture. This removes fees entirely on transactions and data transmissions, resolving the real time and fine granular payment obstacle, as well as ensuring data integrity for free, resolving the security concerns tied to data trading. Additionally this means that the network is entirely decentralized, unlike blockchain architecture which centralizes around mining-farms which again centralize into mining-pools, writes David.
The Data Marketplace project was started some years ago and is now finally ready to begin its first phase with public testing.The Data Marketplace is open for everyone to participate right now. In the next few weeks, IOTA will be opening up an API for the marketplace so that anyone can contribute with their sensors, and build new data-driven applications. Right now the entire Proof of Concept runs in real-time on the IOTA test network, with full end-to-end data verifiability and security offered via MAM in the users browser.
Image Credit: IOTA Foundation