ICO Review — 5 reasons why DataBroker DAO is the future of sensor data

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Crypto ICO Review - US/FR

7 min readMay 28, 2018

DataBroker DAO is the first decentralized marketplace which allows owners of Internet of Things (IoT) sensor data to sell their data to third parties.

1. A booming sector and untapped data

The explosion of the number of devices and the connectivity of individuals has created a new market with almost infinite opportunities. This market of connected objects also called “the Internet of Things” (or IoT) has been growing steadily for the past 10 years. According to several studies, the IoT sensor market is expected to reach $38.41 billion by 2022 ; an annual growth rate of 42.08% between 2016 and 2022. Ditto for the number of sensors deployed that will increase from 9 billion in 2016 to an estimate of 33 billion by 2019.

Every year, individuals, businesses, researchers and governments spend billions of dollars buying and maintaining their IoT sensor network. It’s estimated that this global market for IoT sensors has exceeded $600 billion a year, including the purchase, installation and maintenance of equipment as well as the acquisition of software packages needed to interpret and enrich the data.

Except that, these data are stored in “private silos” belonging to the owners of the sensors that use their data to improve their services or (sometime) to resell these data once enriched. The consequence is that these data are largely underutilized by their owner. In addition, maintaining an IoT sensor network is expensive and the profitability generated with these is very rarely.

DataBroker DAO wants to revolutionize this market by creating a decentralized marketplace that will allow IoT sensor owners to fully exploit this data by selling it to third parties.

2. A decentralized solution based on Blockchain and smart contracts

DataBroker DAO platform is based on four type of population : the owner of sensors who have sensor data to sell, the buyer of data who buy data for its own purposes, the data processor who buy data in order to enrich them and resell them to their customers and the gateway operator which expose the gateway they operate to allow sensor owners to sell their data on the platform.

Currently, data emitted by IoT sensors flow only to the sensor owner’s private silo via a wireless sensor network (WSN) and gateway operators that are typically operated by telecommunication companies or sensor manufacturers directly.

In order to the owner of the sensors can sell their data to potential buyers, it will be necessary to add an interconnection between the gateway operator and the DataBroker marketplace. For this, the gateway operator will have to set up his own Ethereum blockchain node in order to run the DataBroker DAO APi over it.

To sell their data on the marketplace and give them visibility, sensor owners must pay a certain number of DXT tokens. These DXT tokens will be staked by the marketplace to guarantee the good behavior of the seller. If the seller wants to have a better visibility on the marketplace, he can fulfill a larger number of DXT tokens.

Once the data is present on the marketplace, buyers can discover and buy an access to these data by paying with DXT tokens.

In the case where the buyer is not satisfied by the data received, he can launch a “challenge” on these data (equivalent to a negative opinion) by paying a certain amount of DXT tokens. In the case of a single negative opinion, there will be no impact for the data and the seller. On the other hand, if several challenges are launched, a verification by a DataBroker DAO administrator will be carried out. If the administrator agrees with the buyers, they will share with the platform the vendor’s DXT tokens staked during the uploading of the data. In the opposite case, buyers’ tokens blocked during the launch of the challenge will be shared between the seller and the platform.

Once the data has been purchased, data must be sent to the buyer’s storage. The gateway operator is already configured to flow the data from the sensors to the owner’s private silo. Thus, adding additional routing of purchased data to an Internet location is simply an extension of its current process. To perform this operation, the gateway operator will receive 10% of each transaction as a DTX token. For its part, the DataBroker platform also receives 10%. The most important part of the transaction is for the owner of the sensor who receives the remaining 80%.

This entire process is based on the use of smart contracts put in place by Databroker DAO on the Ethereum network. The image below describes all the processes that are going on around this smart contracts.

3. A functioning beta platform and a quick roadmap

The past few months the team has worked very hard to build a
working platform. The result is a functioning beta platform is available with some features. You can check out this beta version at https://beta.databrokerdao.com.
Even if it’s only a beta version with limited data, the interface is very simple, intuitive and user friendly.

The core features of the beta version of the platform are:

The wallet which is a basic crypto wallet
Sensor data stream listings that show, by a rudimentary view, the sensor data available.
Sensor data details which allow buyer to verify if the data are that expected
Dataset listing that show the list of the dataset available ; a dataset
is a set of data analysed, aggregated and enhanced reselled by sensor buyers.

The roadmap is very interesting because the mainnet is planned for Q2 2018 and the first sales of data (in private sale in access limited to whitelist) for Q4 2018. The beginning of the year 2019 will aim to deliver libraries and integrations for commonly used tools to enable simplified use of raw data available in the marketplace. Meanwhile, the main challenge for DataBroker DAO will be to strengthen its team both at the development level and at the commercial level.

4. A great team

The DataBroker DAO team consists of 11 people. The two co-founders are Matthew Van Niekerk (CEO of DataBroker DAO and SettleMint, VP European Partnerships for t0.com) and Roderik van der Veer (Technical Director of DataBroker DAO & Settlemint, in the past he also founded Blockchain Vlaanderen and was Technical Director of Kunstmaan). Other members of the team are experienced specialists in areas such as marketing and communication, blockchain, software architecture, project management, …

In addition, DataBroker DAO is a project from SettleMint (the two founders of DataBroker DAO also have the same functions at SettleMint) which is a start-up specializing in the creation of tools that simplify the creation of blockchain applications for IT teams. The project will therefore be able to benefit from all the Blockchain experience of the SettleMint teams.

There are also 4 advisors, the main one being Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com.

5. The Alliance

The DataBroker DAO platform will not add value if it does not offer IoT sensor data for sale and purchase. So, it’s necessary that real sellers and buyers of IoT sensor data use the platform. With this mindset, the DataBroker DAO team has been working hard, the past few months, to create the DataBroker DAO Alliance, which brings together IoT players who can sell and buy data from IoT sensors. The objective of this Alliance is to reunite together the major players of the IoT and to foster a collaborative ecosystem between the different parties. Furthermore, it will permit a best support to the fundamentally changing market and also to develop the platform with a common requirement. Currently, some fifteen companies / start-ups have (already) joined the alliance including Yuktix, Senthus, Iquadrat, Skylark, IUNGO Networ, Lumo Labs and Verses.

Another information is that DataBroker DAO also joined the AIOTI General Assembly. This is an initiative of the European Commission aimed at strengthening the dialogue and interaction between IoT actors in Europe in order to contribute to the creation of a dynamic European IoT ecosystem.