DataBroker DAO new year’s update by CEO & founder Matthew Van Niekerk
Dear Community,
I would like to wish you all a very great new year and thank you for your continued support. We have been proceeding on many fronts with DataBroker DAO, most of which has been (and some continues to be) under NDA with potential partners and exchanges. As the results of our efforts move to a stage that they can be publicly communicated, you are and always will be the first to know. At this point in time, I would like to provide a few updates in terms of planned events, partnerships and exchanges.
Exchange Listing
As you know, we are listed on a few exchanges already and have been actively looking for additional exchange listings to further build on the community. We have applied for listing to all of the exchanges suggested in the community and a few others as well. I would like to provide positive updates but, regrettably, we have no new updates at this point in time. From 2 of the 7 exchanges that we have applied to, we have received feedback that although they are not ready to list DTX today, they are very interested in DataBroker DAO and would like us to re-apply within 6 months after our partnerships have further developed. Below is an extract from the response of Bittrex:
January 7, 2019
“We build long term relationships with each of the tokens we list on our exchange and we want to be there to assist in their success. Listing a project prematurely can hinder this objective and may result in delisting before a project has had adequate opportunity to develop. This can harm your project and our mutual customers. Bittrex would love the opportunity to re-evaluate your project in 3 to 6 months after further adoption has been achieved.”
Bittrex Support
I for one can only agree that adoption of DTX for its intended utility purposes in DataBroker DAO is essential for long term success and that is precisely the reason we have been focused on building key partnerships in this rapidly growing ecosystem. This brings us the next topic for updates, partnerships.
Partnerships
We announced on December 12th that Ericsson joined the DataBroker DAO Alliance and that we would be joining the Ericsson 5G campus where concepts are further developed and pilots conducted. Our engagement kicks off officially on the 24th of January where we will lay the ground work for interoperability testing and later pilots. We are excited to be working with Ericsson and the other companies involved (more than 100 in total). More information about the campus can be found at: https://www.ericsson.com/assets/content/fe62de6b618247098b3c32ed8b75faff/5g_life_campus-introduction.pdf
We are working on partnerships with 4 additional global players but at this point, we are still a few weeks away from the next major announcement. What I can say at the moment is that all 4 of these companies are 1) operating an existing IoT platform service, 2) have global reach with their respective platforms, 3) have large developer communities building already on the platform and 4) are eager to incorporate data marketplace functionalities into their existing offering.
An IoT platform provider typically offers an end-to-end solution to large companies (manufacturers, cities, agricultural) spanning from the edge (the sensor) through to applications integrating the data from these sensors. This typically includes solutions for Connectivity Management, Device Management and Data Management with a host of own or community built solutions for each. Our approach with these platforms is to integrate as an extension of the existing offering, thus including data brokerage services as a default component of their solution. DataBroker DAO is proving to be highly complementary in these environments.
Below is an example of how this would work with such an IoT platform provider. Please note, we do not have an agreement with Mbed, Pelion or Arm at this point. This is purely illustrative to demonstrate where data brokerage extends such an IoT platform to add value (and revenues) for its users.
As the collaboration with Ericsson 5G Campus progresses and agreements are reached with additional partners, we will provide updates here via our blog and via the telegram community for DataBroker DAO.
Events
We have completed several events through 2018 where we won international recognition for DataBroker DAO. A few highlights include:
D10e in Vilnius where we won 2nd place in the pitch competition.
CB Crytocurrency and Blockchain Conference in San Francisco where we won 1st place in the pitch competition.
Roadshow in China to build awareness. 5 cities, 7 events.
These are just a few of the event highlights. In total we were present at 32 events in 2018 and the final significant one was Gartner IT Symposium where we were announced as a “Cool Vendor”
Looking ahead to events where we will be present going forward, you will see that we switching our event focus from crypto and blockchain events to industry focused events. This change in focus began already in 2018 with our presence at Industrial Transformation (industry 4.0) in Singapore in October and with our participation in the Gartner Sympositum/ITxpo in November. This will continue through 2019 as we seek additional alliance members, build strategic partnerships and onboard additional users. This change in focus puts our time and resources fully into driving industry adoption of DataBroker DAO to unlock the utility of the platform. A static marketplace is not very interesting after all.
The first mega-event we are attending this year is Mobile World Congress. As you may know, it is one of the largest technology events globally with more than 2400 companies exhibiting and more than 100,000 attendees. We will be there providing demos of DataBroker DAO, building community relationships and securing new partnerships.
The event is from February 25–28 and between now and then, we are contacting suitable partners that are attending from around the world, having preliminary discussions and planning face to face meetings at the event to kick off partnerships.
We are looking into additional events in Q2 and will let you know when these are decided.
Associations
We are members of several industry associations and will continue to contribute to these ecosystems in 2019. These are listed on our site so I won’t rehash here but would like to make a special update for one of these.
Some of you will know our team member Tom De Block. He has been spreading the DataBroker DAO word from the very early days at various events and has been leading our participation in several industry forums. Tom has recently been appointed as the chair of the newly formed blockchain track of the Alliance for the Internet of Things Innovation (AIOTI). Tom has been working hard over the past year to build alliances within AIOTI and we are excited that he will take up this new role in addition to supporting DataBroker DAO.
AIOTI was established in 2016 to strengthen the dialogue and interaction among IOT players in Europe and to accelerate IoT adoption in industry. It has quickly grown to more than 150 members with founding members including:
ATOS, Bosch, BT, CNH Industrial, Digital Catapult, Engineering LOI, Gradiant, Huawei, Infineon Technologies, John Deere, Nokia, Signify, Samsung, Schneider Electric, Siemens, Telit Communications, and Vodafone.
We are excited to have become a member of AIOTI last year and look forward to deepening our relationships within the Alliance in the years ahead. More information about AIOTI can be found here https://aioti.eu/
A few additional points
CoinMarketCap (CMC)
There have been a number of questions from the community regarding the accuracy of information provided publicly by CMC about DataBroker DAO. We have provided all input that they have requested and expect that the corrections will be made shortly.
Recruiting
We are actively recruiting key positions to strengthen the DataBroker DAO team and expect to make some announcements shortly. With the change of focus towards deepening industry adoption, we are bringing in seasoned veterans in the IoT platform space who will support the continued growth of DataBroker DAO.
In closing, 2018 has been an eventful year in getting up and running and we are heading into 2019 with a number of key partnerships signed and many more in the works to drive adoption. Again, I would like to thank the community for playing an important role in getting to this point and to thank you in advance for your continued confidence in the team for the year ahead.
Matthew Van Niekerk.
