Data Tokenization is Coming - Here’s What You Need to Know

The world we live in is more connected than ever before. The Internet of Things is expanding at an exponential rate. The market is expected to surge from $157 billion in 2016 to $457 billion by 2020.

Right now, consumers have no choice but to give away their data to middlemen. These middlemen then pass it on in a chain-like structure to other middlemen, who then sell it to large corporations for a lot of money. Meanwhile, the consumer receives no reward.

As it stands, we are the product.

Even more notably, customers have no control over which data they are handing over to these corporations. Most people are completely oblivious to how much information large corporations actually know about them.

Some people are already starting to wake up and take a stand. Over the past few years, tech giants like Facebook have been receiving increasing backlash about their data handling policies.

Even more recently in November 2017, Uber disclosed a massive data breach that affected over 57 million users and drivers that it had managed to conceal for over a year.

How Could Data-Based Tokens Help to Solve This Problem?

With the rise in the popularity of cryptocurrencies, more and more people are becoming aware of the opportunities that decentralization introduces, and the potential benefits it can provide to everyday users.

For example, let’s imagine you’re in a self-driving car. To run at its optimal level, the car will require lots of information from outside sources. Such information includes:

Traffic congestion updates from other cars

Gas prices from nearby stations

Weather forecasts

Data tokenization would automatically allow your car to get the data it requires and pay for it. Meanwhile, you would be in control of the data your car produces, such as:

Traffic congestion information, which you can sell to other drivers

Your location, which you can sell to local advertisers

Your gas level, which you can sell to local stations

The user will receive tokens as a reward for providing others with access to this data. They can then keep these tokens, exchange them, or use them to gain access to information they need from other third-parties.

How Are Data-Based Tokens Performing on the Market?

Data tokenization is a revolutionary new concept. It has the potential to completely shift control away from large third-parties and corporations, back into the hands of the user.

It’s no surprise there has been a significant surge in the number of data tokenization blockchain projects over the past few months. Many of them have witnessed major success.

IOTA is a solution developed to resolve the problem of transaction costs, scalability, and offline transaction. It is focused on building an IoT solution inspired by - but not based on - blockchain technology.

At the start of June 2017, the price of IOTA was hovering around $0.35. As of mid-January 2018, the price is currently around $2.40.

The Streamr platform is an IoT-enabled blockchain system. It has been designed especially for trading valuable real-time data by tokenizing streaming data and introducing a brand new way for both machines and people to trade it on a decentralized peer-to-peer network.

Its primary purpose is to offer secure and scalable data delivery. It does this using the DATAcoin token. This token is used to access the market and acts as an incentive for data producers to sell their data to consumers.

After Streamr’s ICO in November 2017, the price of its DATAcoin token was $0.078. As of mid-January 2018, the price is currently just under $0.17 per token.

Right now, it seems that Streamr is incredibly undervalued compared to IOTA. Despite being IOTA’s main competitor, one DATAcoin is currently worth less than 10% of it. However, as time progresses, it is likely that this will change.

2017 Was the Year Cryptocurrency Became Mainstream - 2018 Is the Year Blockchain and the IoT Converge...

Blockchain and the Internet of Things go hand-in-hand. Thanks to its transparency and immutability, the blockchain is particularly finding use in areas such as IoT security.

As the IoT, it is almost certain that the popularity of data-based blockchain startups will increase.

2017 was the year everyone found out about the potential of blockchain technology.

2018 will be the year it really begins to gain traction.