The IOTA Foundation, the open-source non-profit foundation from Germany, has launched the first publicly accessible data marketplace for IoT powered by a distributed ledger. The data marketplace will be one of the largest open innovation initiatives around business models in IoT and distributed ledgers, with more than 20 organizations from all over the globe participating.

Data is the new oil, the fuel of the future that is pivotal for the era of connected, smart, and autonomous infrastructure. The rate at which data is generated is growing exponentially, yet over 90% of this data is lost in the void of data silos, where it is not shared with other stakeholders that could extract valuable information for further optimizations and improvements of their products and services. In addition to data silos, when it comes to data monetization, many participants along the value chain are often left out, giving them no option to benefit from the data they generate.

With the democratization of data, we are not only giving connected devices the ability to securely transfer, buy, and sell fine-granular and diverse datasets, we are completely breaking down today’s data silos and enabling a permissionless, interoperable ecosystem that will be the backbone of our connected future. In areas such as mobility, supply chain, smart cities, energy, agriculture, manufacturing, and healthcare, the data marketplace is a catalyst of new innovative applications for IoT, predictive analytics, and machine learning.

Participants from all sectors and industries are represented, companies such as Bosch, Volkswagen, Daimler, Accenture, Samsung, Orange, and much more have deployed sensors that directly sell the data on the marketplace. The data ranges from environmental data from Beijing to anonymized healthcare data from wearables, and even data from trash cans at the Berlin main station. As soon as data is put into IOTA’s decentralized permissionless ledger it is distributed to countless nodes, ensuring that it is impossible to tamper with the data.

The open innovation initiative will run until the beginning of January, giving any interested party the ability to partake. Over the next few weeks, the IOTA Foundation will publish several blog posts, case studies, and opinion pieces together with chosen partners to elaborate on future applications of the data marketplace for specific industries.