Streamr Logo

Nowadays everyone is talking about IoT. It has become a buzzword just like blockchain. People want to put IoT into everything.

There are some attempts to integrate IoT with blockchain. In my opinion however they got one important detail wrong. The main characteristic of IoT is that it will generate extremely large amounts of data. This by its own nature is not really compatible with the logic of blockchain. Blockchains are designed to hold limited amounts of data in a very robust way thanks to decentralization. They are not designed to hold extremely large amounts of data especially because the idea is that all data will be stored forever.

Do we really need thousands of people to store forever the temperature of my house yesterday?

Streamr however went for a very original approach. Rather than building a blockchain for IoT they have built a platform for exchanging live data.

The platform operates as a marketplace which uses its native token DATA

The platform will also simplify as much as possible the exchange of data, this will be done through an editor rather than complex scripting:

Streamr Editor

The connection might not be obvious immediately, but live data is exactly what IoT is about. All this data generated by millions of sensors only has value for a very short amount of time. It’s useful to know the traffic situation right now but it’s useless to know the traffic situation yesterday (at least at the atomic level, there may be a use if the data is aggregated to perform some statistical analysis).

So the right approach to decentralize IoT is not to create a brand-new blockchain, but just to create a platform that allows for real-time streaming of data. This platform is much more useful if it runs on Ethereum so that it can interact with the ETH smart contracts rather than being a new blockchain on its own, and that’s exactly what Streamr is doing.

You can read more about the project on: www.Streamr.com

Streamr is currently traded on Bitfinex

They already have some important customers using their technology, this is what I found: