Decentralised Web Data Scraping — Are you in?

Gerbert
Daratus
Published in
3 min readAug 4, 2017

Everybody knows the saying: Whoever owns the data — rules the world. Today we live under the gigantic load of information and it is very easy to get lost or become distracted by it. As a result we are not able to transform limitless information into business value.

Whoever owns the data — rules the world.

In times of information flood, large quantities of data is being created and freely accessible. It is nearly impossible to explore all the data and get insights without the computing help as the amount of data doubles every few years. Today, being in a data cloud without relevant resources to process data brings more uncertainties. The saying mentioned above could be rephrased: Who accesses and mines data, makes valuable decisions based on insights.

It seems only few big companies have this kind of luxury to mine wide varieties of data and get a basis for their decisions. For small and medium sized companies, these services are complicated, expensive and most companies lack the resources for such opportunities.

Do we have a solution which could serve for most of us?

There are many PC users across the globe who have unused resources and wish to share it. On the other hand, there are many companies which are interested in web data mining. Our solution is to help both sides come together. First thoughts are about blockchain, but you may ask what is the role of blockchain there? Take a look on the blockchain design principles:

  • Powered by thousands of independent computers
  • Distributed decision power and self sustainable network
  • All network participants get value either via incentivization or by getting work results
  • Anyone can participate in the scraping network by providing resources or by getting scraping tasks done

Those principles fit into simplified Decentralised Web Data Scraping model below.

High level Web Data Mining Model

Customers create scraping tasks and submit it to Daratus. Tasks are ranked by complexity and distributed across the network. Resource providers (miners) bid their resources and receive incentives for executing scraping tasks. Value exchange among Daratus network participants will be implemented via blockchain technology.

Business Concept

During crazy ICO sales this summer we saw 30M, 70M, 150M raised in several hours — you might wonder: what value do these businesses provide to warrant such enormous investment? What is the business model to support liquidity of those tokens?

People invest in the future and expect return on their investment. To meet expectations, we must provide a service, which has demand from real world businesses and can sustain itself.

According to our market evaluation — services will be demanded in both fiat currency and crypto tokens. Miner incentives will be implemented via crypto tokens. Token trade volume and liquidity will be supplied by demand from real world businesses, competitive price and via network effect.

Web data scraping has been used in wide range of areas :

  • In retail for pricing intelligence
  • In sales to generate leads
  • In real estate for pricing research
  • In e-commerce for SEO analysis
  • In marketing for content discovery
  • In betting for real-time odds updates

There are plenty of businesses where Web data scraping is critical. Daratus network simplify the process for companies. Also, provide an opportunity for PC users to earn some value in exchange to their network and computing resources.

It sounds valuable. Doesn’t it?

What’s next?

During implementation it is important for us to have validity checks and feedback. Project implementation will be adjusted according to them.

Daratus network launch will strongly rely on community. Therefore we are building one. Everyone interested is welcome to:

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Gerbert
Daratus
Editor for

Born in Lithuania, grew up on the Internet