DIA explained in 3 minutes
The most important questions about how reliable and open-source financial data is sourced and shared on the DIA platform
The following article breaks down the DIA platform for you in a brief and comprehensive manner. So let’s jump right into it:
What is DIA all about?
DIA stands for Decentralised Information Asset and is an open-source platform that enables different parties to share and use financial and digital asset data.
Why does the world need DIA?
In present-day financial markets, access to data is controlled by a few centralised information vendors that operate in isolated silos. This causes data to be non-transparent and expensive and contributes to unequal market conditions, which adversely affect smaller market actors. Digital asset data is equally opaque and highly error-prone as it is mainly provided by a single website, Coinmarketcap, which doesn’t validate the data it pulls from the exchanges.
What is revolutionary about DIA?
All data is gathered through a crowdsourcing process powered by blockchain to ensure absolute accuracy of all information and underlying methodologies. This decentralised nature is what differentiates the platform from present-day information providers, which are centralised and can only build trust based on their reputation. Basically, DIA is like a decentralised Wikipedia for financial information. It democratises the access to financial data and creates fair market conditions for all players––regardless of their size.
How does this work?
DIA is a so-called token curated registry (TCR) and employs economic incentives for decentralised data curation. This comprises a combination of platform-native token (DIA token) incentives, crowd-sourced data validation as well as game-theory optimised flows, which make it economically irrational for inaccurate data or methodologies to persist on the platform.
How is the data collected?
Any data seeker, i.e. any person or entity with an interest in transparent, affordable and reliable market data, can submit a request ticket on Github that is linked to a bounty and published on the DIA platform. Data providers act on these bounties and build scrapers to access the requested data. Once the code is submitted, there are two possible outcomes:
- The code is either accepted by the community to be accurate, causing the bounty linked to the ticket to be paid to the developer in DIA tokens, or
- another community member challenges the submitted code to be wrong by staking DIA tokens and provides an alternative solution. It is then decided through a community stake voting process who supplied the correct code and who will receive the stake in question.
How is the data stored and accessed?
Datasets are stored off-chain in the DIA database while the corresponding hashes are stored on the Ethereum blockchain to make any attempt to manipulate data impossible. Data can be accessed both through oracles (on-chain) as well as through APIs (off-chain). While historic financial data can be accessed free of charge, DIA tokens are charged for accessing live prices or specific APIs.
Who are the users of DIA?
The list of potential platform users is huge. Data seekers will highly benefit from reliable and transparent financial data. This comprises fund managers, traders, individual investors, content suppliers, crypto data platforms, market research institutes as well as financial regulation and taxation authorities.
Sounds great. How can I participate?
DIA brings a range of different stakeholders together to build the financial information platform of the future.
- Are you a data seeker who can’t wait to finally access reliable and transparent financial and digital asset data? Then check out Coinhub, our MVP dApp with decentralised sourced crypto data.
- Developers and anyone who is interested in acting as a data analyst should visit our Github page where you will find all funded issues that are currently open.
More details about DIA and our upcoming token sale can be found on our website.
