Those days everyone is talking about IOTA and IoT on the blockchain. IOTA has recently become the 4th biggest crypto coin after a massive increase in price.

The price action is also impressive:

Let’s look at the idea behind IOTA, basically a blockchain designed for IoT.

While it is true that IoT can benefit from blockchain technology mostly for the permissionless and censorship resistance elements (which allow to avoid the need to use different nonpublic API for every type of application) it is also true that there is no real need to develop a brand-new blockchain for this.

What is really unique about Streamr is that they have targeted the most important niche of IoT: live streaming of data.

One of the key points of IoT is that it produces extremely large quantities of data which have very little value outside of the real-time element.

Imagine for example the traffic information for self driving cars or other things like the weather or the price of gas at different gas stations. This information only has value while real-time, just like when we watch the news we only care about today events, we don’t really care about what happened last year.

Streamr has developed a technology that allows for the streaming of live data in exchange for payment. That means that your car can earn money by streaming data from its sensors to other cars, and purchase the data from the other cars creating a healthy ecosystem which prevents getting data without participating.

They are working very hard on ensuring that the system is not only effective but also user-friendly. They are creating a simple editor that allows to control the streaming of data in a very user-friendly way:

The key part is that IoT can strongly benefit from blockchain technology BUT it doesn’t require yet another blockchain :-) Streamr runs on Ethereum and instead of trying to reinvent the wheel simply focus on what matters, the streaming of live IoT data.

That doesn’t mean of course that it’s not possible to profit from Streamr, the Streamr token is required in order to buy and sell data on the Streamr platform, it simply means that rather than focusing on reinventing the wheel and creating a blockchain from scratch they focus on building a technology which has a real and immediate application and runs on a proven and time-tested platform (Ethereum).

Here’s an interesting video where the CEO of Streamr shows how it works and the possibilities it offers:

Another important point is that right now Streamr is very undervalued compared to IOTA, while both are listed on BitFinex the market capitalization is very different:

So currently Streamr (The main competitor of IOTA) is worth less than 1% of IOTA.

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I also found this comment on Reddit a few hours after this article had been posted on /r/ethtrader:

If this is true (I welcome the developers of IOTA to contact me to discuss this in case it’s not true) then the approach of Streamer to operate on top of Ethereum seems to have been a wise move in order to guarantee decentralization.

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Another comment appeared on Twitter about IOTA just after this article was published, I want to report it because it may be helpful to have people make a more informed decision:

While trying to build a blockchain from scratch like IOTA is doing is certainly a beautiful technical exercise we have to wonder what is the need to reinvent the wheel and take the risk of introduce serious vulnerabilities instead of using a proven platform like Ethereum like Streamr is doing?

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I get a lot of questions regarding how can Streamr scale, I think the following comment that I found offers a very good answer:

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A lot of people attack me saying that I don’t understand IOTA well enough to make this criticism. It is true that I’m not an expert on IOTA, but I want to include the views of someone that probably everyone knows:

https://twitter.com/petertoddbtc/status/942206322023587840

http://codesuppository.blogspot.ca/2017/12/iota-tangled-mess.html

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Disclaimer: I am advisor for Streamr