IOTA Data Marketplace Growth

IOTA was founded in 2015 by David Sønstebø, Dominik Schiener, Sergey Ivancheglo, and Dr. Serguei Popov. The non-profit Foundation was registered in Germany in November of 2017. Many people think that IOTA stands for the “Internet of Things Architecture” or “Internet of Things Applications” but the actual reason that the Foundation chose IOTA was because IOTA is the ninth letter in the Greek alphabet and it stands for the smallest possible unit.

The IOTA Foundation created the Tangle which is the data structure behind the IOTA protocol. The IOTA Tangle operates in the form of a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) which facilitates the exchange and confirmation of transactions. These transactions are unique when compared to other currently-available DAGs as they can be used to transfer both data and monetary value simultaneously.

If you would like to take a deeper look into how IOTA and the Tangle actually work, please take a few minutes to read The Tangle: an Illustrated Introduction that was created by Alon Gal of the IOTA Foundation.

The IOTA Data Marketplace was launched in November of 2017 with several large companies participating during the initial beta phase. The Marketplace makes it possible to securely store, sell, and access data streams. Users of the IOTA Data Marketplace fall into two categories; buyers and sellers of data. Data is offered for sale at a set amount of IOTA and individuals or corporations can purchase this data.

31 companies launched the IOTA Data Marketplace in November of 2017. The number of companies that participated in the Data Marketplace during January of 2018 totaled 44 entities. The Data Marketplace continued to grow into March of 2018 as the total number of companies participating in the IOTA Data Network has grown to 55 registered participants. Two companies (Microsoft and Schneider Electric) are no longer listed as participants in the IOTA Data Marketplace.

A few things stand out after reviewing the growth of the Data Marketplace:

• 29 out of the initial 31 participants remain in the Data Marketplace as of March (2018).
• 13 participants were added to the Marketplace participant list during January (2018).
• 13 additional participants were added to the IOTA Data Marketplace participant list during March (2018).
• Two companies were no longer listed on the participants list as of March (2018). These companies are Microsoft and Schneider Electric.

Here is a table that was created by Haakon from the IOTA Discord that shows the growth of the Data Marketplace over the past 4–5 months:

The IOTA Data Marketplace is still in beta form as of right now but we are hoping that it will be made available to the public soon.

Please feel free to contact me via the comments on Reddit or on Discord if you would like to further discuss this topic (or anything else related to IOTA). #datamarketplace