Part 2: Alex view
It wasn’t long between my first learning what an ICO is and us starting the project of creating our own token.
I’d had a general interest in cryptocurrencies and blockchain gleaned from what the IT press was writing about it. ICOs had just started coming up in that reading and seemed an interesting concept — but to me where quite remote from the messaging middleware that we were doing.
So just imagine my surprise when one Monday morning, Tobias outlined his idea for XBR to me: creating an additional layer on top of Crossbar.io which would support data trading, using a payment token.
The surprise quickly turned into excitement. This was a grand vision that brought together multiple topics — ones that had come up in our business as well as ones that I was personally interested in.
On the business side the question of data sharing had come up with multiple users: They recognized the potential value of the data generated by their businesses. They also saw that Crossbar.io allowed the secure exchange of data. What was lacking were things like a place to offer data and a quick and simple billing system.
Personally, I was increasingly wondering whether the emerging data economy was on track towards becoming an oligopoly: A few big players such as Google and Facebook amassing the data required to feed machine-learning algorithms and derive valuable insights while the rest of the world was left out in the cold.
XBR immediately seemed like it could provide the foundation to address these problems and concerns. It could provide the infrastructure for anybody to trade data, lower the entry barriers to the data economy, and allow an ecosystem which fosters diversity and serves as many players as possible.
With Crossbar.io we already had a technology stack that was built to connect parties across devices, system and languages. It provides essential features for data sharing, and was secure (as secure as anything in IT is today).
This excitement didn’t subside. The more we explored the idea, the clearer individual aspects became, the more this showed itself as something not only useful but required. Data sharing may be the mother of all systems integration problems — and I’m glad to be a key part of developing a viable solution.
Alexander is co-founder of Crossbar.io and has a law degree, but is not a lawyer. Instead, after a detour teaching English abroad, he spent the last decade getting deeper into IT. He went from writing patent applications for user interfaces to designing and implementing them himself (as well as doing anything else which needs doing in a startup). Along the way he’s developed an appreciation for how fundamental the use of data is to our present and future lives.
