We’re happy to announce our partnership with Streamr, the leading blockchain company for monetizing IoT data in an open marketplace.

At Elk, our mission is to easily integrate IoT with decentralized technologies, opening the way for better privacy, crypto-payable machines, sensor oracles, and true data ownership.

Data is considered to be the new gold. Many companies are eager to buy aggregated data to help them take the right decisions, whether in marketing an existing product, adding new features or launching a new one that tailors to their customers’ needs.

For example, self-driving car companies need huge amounts of data. While the likes of Google and Tesla are way ahead in terms of collecting self-driving car data, according to Chris Ballinger, CEO of MOBI, it’s still going to take a half a trillion miles to develop cars that are truly safe and can handle all the real-world driving situations, such as driving through cities in bumper-to-bumper traffic or navigating the highway in torrential downpours. To cut down time, car companies must not rely on their own cars as the only source of data, they also have to buy this data externally from a large number of car owners.

On the other hand, IoT data streams are difficult to handle and carry sensitive information. Trust and security are a major blocker to IoT adoption and its data monetization. However, blockchain adds more privacy and security to the process. Each transaction is validated and recorded publicly, increasing the confidence between buyers and sellers.

At Elk, we extend the trust to the device level. Having an Ethereum light client on the device, we enable the sending of signed and trusted sensors’ data from the device directly to the blockchain, without the need to pass by a centralized server.

According to a report by “Data Makes Possible”, by 2030, blockchain-enabled IoT data marketplace revenue could reach $4.4 billion. The market value of the data being transacted via these exchanges could rise to $3.6 trillion by 2030 — by which time, more than 1 million organizations would be monetizing their IoT data assets and more than 12 exabytes of data would be transacted every day.

There are many examples of types of data you can sell. You can sell your driving data to insurance companies, your utilities’ usage like water and electricity to market intelligence companies, data from your wearable devices, or even the air quality in your home! The problem is, no company is interested in buying one person’s data, it has to be in bulk, and that’s where Streamr comes in. Streamr has a community and a marketplace for a fair exchange of data, allowing developers to connect and sell data sets together.

Elk ensures that your data is yours alone. In other words, we augment data autonomy across all your IoT devices. You can then sell this data at a profit using Streamr.

We will be sharing a few tutorials on how to build a blockchain-connected IoT project and integrate it with Streamr to monetize its data. You can learn more about Streamr by watching this video.

Decentralized IoT not only allows you to completely own your data and sell it if you want, but it also opens a new dimension of serverless private communication, devices that accept crypto payments and leveraging sensors as oracles to smart contracts.

2019 is the year IoT changes forever. Join us at elk.cc and let’s build it together.