An ambitious project, The Data Marketplace, developed by Berlin-based IOTA Foundation since 2015, is gaining momentum as Microsoft, Cisco, Samsung, Fujitsu, Deutsche Telekom, Bosh and other IT giants are joining the testing phase.
According to IOTA’s official website, the goal of the project is to enable a truly decentralized marketplace to open up data silos that currently keep data in control of few entities. It will be the first publicly accessible data marketplace for the IoT (Internet of Things) industry. Through this marketplace IOTA is creating a way for connected devices to transfer, buy and sell diverse datasets while creating access to data that often sits unused, all with substantial security.
IOTA said more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated daily and are increasing exponentially on a monthly basis. However, more than 99 percent of this data is wasted and lost because currently there is no way for owners to sell or share this data securely.
“Any kind of data can be monetized. If you have a weather station collecting wind, temperature, humidity, and barometric data, for instance, you can sell that to an entity that is doing climatic research,” said IOTA co-founder David Sonstebo. “We are very excited to announce the launch of our data marketplace… This will act as a catalyst for a whole new paradigm of research, artificial intelligence, and democratization of data.”
“All of [our partners] are right now participating in the marketplace with their sensors that they deployed either on premise, or out on the field somewhere,” said IOTA co-founder Dominik Schiener to CoinJournal.
“We are excited to partner with IOTA foundation and proud to be associated with its new data marketplace initiative. Next generation technology will accelerate the connected, intelligent world and go beyond blockhain that will foster innovative real-world solutions, applications, and pilots for our customers,” said Microsoft representative Omkar Naik, sddressing the potential of the IOTA marketplace.
“The possibilities of applications based on Blockchain and especially Tangle (“next generation Blockchain”) are immense. Providing public access to valuable data is one of the most pressing challenges within IoT. The Data Marketplace of the IOTA Foundation is one of the most innovative initiatives in this area. As one of the world’s largest IT companies, Fujitsu is strongly supportive by developing Blockchain and Tangle-based offerings and actively integrating them as scalable solutions into the ecosystems of our customers,” stated Dr. Rolf Werner, Head of Central Europe at Fujitsu.
“We think it’s a great opportunity for Deustche Telekom to investigate and prototype future blockchain-based, data-driven business models with different partners. Compliance with data privacy regulations has to be regarded at every stage, and IOTA provides the right tech, right now,” said John Calian, VP of The Blockchain Group at Telekom Innovation Laboratories (central research and development unit of Deutsche Telekom).
Distributed ledger technology
IOTA implements public distributed ledger architecture, called Tangle, which is a form of DAG (directed acyclic graph) in which every transaction or data transmission validates two previous ones, with each referencing two previous ones before them, and so on. It means that network validation is an intrinsic property of the network and is thus no longer decoupled from the usage of the network, as is the case with regular blockchain architectures. This removes fees entirely on transactions and data transmissions, thereby eliminating the real-time payment obstacle.
IOTA claims that Tangle enables the network to remain entirely decentralized, unlike blockchain architectures that centralize around mining-farms which then further concentrate into mining-pools. “Tangle naturally succeeds the blockchain as its next evolutionary step, and offers features that are required to establish a machine-to-machine micropayment system,” says the latest release of IOTA whitepaper.
“As soon as data is put onto IOTA’s decentralized ledger, it is distributed to countless nodes or the computers that connect to the blockchain network, ensuring that it is impossible to tamper with the data. IOTA is kind of the first distributed ledger that goes beyond the blockchain,” Sonstebo says. “We got rid of the blocks and we got rid of the chains, which has resulted in getting rid of the major pain points or limitations of the blockchain such as fees, scalability, and centralization.”