The author’s 2-wheeled friend, before the idea hit him

It was around 10:30 PM, a few days ago, after a nice bike ride through the city. I took my phone out of my backpack, in order to see for how long I just cycled, how fast I was on specific road sections, and if I managed to break a few personal records.

The app knew a lot about me!

After hitting ‘sync activity’ in the app, it hit me: it’s been a few months since I started using this app and I tracked my rides pretty often — whether they were by bike or a simple evening jog. For all this time, I kept sharing a lot of data with this app, like location, speed, distance, and so on. Heck, once I even added my bike in the app, just to connect with other owners, so they could give me some maintenance tips.

Basically, I gave away my data, willingly, for free. And I had no idea who’s going to use it and what for. And come to think of it, I’m not the only one doing this daily, multiple times. Because yes, we’re sharing tons of data every time we’re using an app on our phones, without being compensated somehow for this.

I like to call myself a cryptocurrency enthusiast, so I’m somewhat aware of a few of the most interesting projects and Opiria is definitely among them. Simply put, you get paid for sharing personal data. The data that you’re giving for free anyway.

Just think about it: the Facebook app on your phone — yes, we know, Cambridge Analytics and stuff has access to the information you share on your profile, as well as your location, contacts and the list can go on. You just need to check for the permissions you provided when you installed the app. Same thing goes for Instagram, Twitter, or other social networks.

Then we have all kinds of apps that require permissions, like the ones you pair with your fitness bands or smartwatches. Besides location, they do know how many calories you’ve burnt through the day, for how long you usually sleep and how rested you are, your pulse, for how long you sit or stand.

As a side note, a mattress producer would totally be interested in how they can improve the quality of one’s sleep, don’t you think?

The idea is simple

We share data several times, daily, and we don’t get anything for it — even though such information is considered highly valuable. Just for the record, the data market has a value of over 250 billion USD nowadays. Let that sink in for a while.

This is where Opiria comes in, ladies and gents. Now I’m not saying this just because I’m directly involved in this project — since I knew about it for a few months — but the idea is that it managed to figure out a solution for this problem; by putting together a data trading platform.

How it works, you’re asking? Well, you share what data you want, using the Opiria app, and you get compensated with PDATA Tokens — a currency that expresses the value of your personal data and can be traded using smart contracts, on the blockchain. And you’re the one who chooses who you sell your data to; so you’re in full control.

So why not earn some cash for just sharing away stuff about you? I bet that you can’t come up with an easier way of creating a passive income right now!

Sounds good, don’t you think? All the details you need to know can be found on Opiria.io. Oh, and by the way, the token sale is now live. You might want to check that out as well!