We launched the Streamr decentralized Marketplace for real-time data back in late May and since then, we’ve had lots of insightful questions from our community about how it’s been going. Since June I’ve personally been in charge of developing the Marketplace it from a business perspective so this blog is an attempt at being as open as possible about what we’ve learnt from the past four months or so and what might be done in the future to improve the Marketplace in terms usability, and increasing the number of people adopting it as a platform for buying and selling their real-time data.

I’m an avid proponent of continuous improvement and learning and so the past four months have taught us a lot. A rough assessment is this: we’ve made progress in some areas but in other areas we’ve stalled or hit roadblocks. But all of this is for the good because it has taught us a lot about market dynamics related to real-time data as well as more in-depth insights about the Marketplace’s functionality.

Let’s start digging through these insights in more detail:

Companies want to monetise data

One of the most positive things we’ve seen is that companies that are already monetising data on one platform are pretty willing to monetise it on another. Data providers aren’t fixated with just one channel for data monetisation. As the effort to integrate data to a new marketplace decreases, it’s rational to maximize the number of marketplaces a data source is listed on. The reasons why data providers want to join the Streamr Marketplace are divided between the exposure we can offer, the new revenue channel it enables as well as the ability to try out blockchain technology.

Pricing

Pretty much every data provider we attempted to onboard to the Marketplace had one recurring question: “What’s the right price for my data?” Even for companies that already monetise their data, the question was still relevant, since the Streamr Marketplace offers the benefit of microtransactions. Whilst most vendors have been used to selling their data for a minimum of one month, Streamr now offers providers the opportunity to vend their data for just one hour. (In a future of Machine to Machine transactions, we expect this could even be reduced to seconds or based on events received).

There is never going to be a definitive answer to that question. As obvious as it sounds, things are worth, what the market is prepared to pay for them. We will probably be able to give a better ballpark figure in the future as we maintain discussions with an ever increasing number of industries, companies and individuals.

We have also gained some ideas to help the discourse between data providers and potential data buyers. One of them is the community product and another one is data bounties.

Data bounties will allow potential buyers to list their their willingness to purchase certain type of data with a certain price point. Data providers could also set their data tentatively on display to spark interest from potential buyers. With the Community Product, data buyers will be able to group data from similar products (say, all Fitbits in France) and buy the data from those vendors in one go. It will be an exciting development as the payments can then go to back to the individuals directly and this will help fulfil our overall mission of putting people back in control of their data. I say a little more about this below but here is our current diagram of how we expect this pattern to function: