IOTA opens data marketplace

Since today, IOTA can do more than act: on the Data Marketplace, sensor data can be purchased worldwide for IOTA.

Data is often referred to as the gold or oil of the digital world. No wonder - companies like Facebook, Google or Amazon make a not inconsiderable part of their income with our user data. It is not without reason that Cypherpunks in their manifesto have called for a strengthening of digital privacy - simply because data and personal information are property. A similar point was voiced by William Mougayar in his keynote speech at the Blockchain Innovation Forum Congress when he talked about the three people.

But not only our own data are very valuable; A typical morning ritual of many people is to look at their smartwatches or their smartphones to find out about the current temperature. This is usually recorded and transmitted by a sensor maintained by a meteorological institute.

One idea of ​​the Internet of Things is that of exchanging and trading such data. As part of an inter-machine communication, systems could interact with each other with data. But it could also be very interesting for us humans to get data directly from the sensory end user.

A current problem is that data has a similar fate to money: central institutions often have their hand on that data. This is not just a purely idealistic problem of the form "free data for free people"; The central institutions that host this vast amount of data in so-called data silos unknowingly interpret and filter this data. This means that perhaps knowledge that could have been obtained from a slightly different analysis of this data is lost. For this reason, many in science speak for open data - that the data on which publications are based, are quickly accessible to those interested.

IOTA Data Marketplace - A sensor-based peer-to-peer market
IOTA has taken an important step forward in this respect: on data.iota.org different - so far few - sensors can be requested regarding their data. For a query of a weather station in Tel Aviv, which is supervised by IOTA, looks like this then for example:

For a price of 20 cents, which went directly to the data provider, you could look at the development of temperature and light intensity in Tel Aviv.

It is important to emphasize that these 20 cents (which, incidentally, currently do not cost the interested end-users, since all transactions run through the testnet in the current proof-of-concept phase) are not transaction fees. As stated elsewhere, the "transaction fee" in IOTA is the willingness to verify other transactions.

Distributed Ledger Technology: More than just fintech
Still, this query takes a long time, but the potential is clearly visible. The digital marketplace, built by the IOTA Foundation, shows that Blockchain and Tangle are technologies that are much more than fintech. Bitcoin said "Be Your Own Bank", IOTA says "Be Your Own Data Market".

For this reason, the IOTA Foundation was able to win various big players such as Accenture, Bosch or Fujitsu as cooperation partners. In the future, the Foundation intends to expand this marketplace of data through various events, hoping for community participation. We are curious and will certainly report it!