The business model of Internet 2.0 was free products, paid for by capturing user behaviour and personal data, often in ways users did not expect. Streamr’s addition to the Web 3 model allows for the creation of Data Unions — ad hoc collectives of users pooling their data to in order to increase its value and then selling subscriptions to it via a decentralised marketplace.

A team from Turkey has built the first of these, a browser extension called Swash, that was first introduced at Mozfest in London in late 2019. Swash allows users to capture their browsing data, gives them tools to hide anything sensitive, and then send it in real-time to Streamr’s data Marketplace, to a special Data Union, where buyers can purchase the aggregated data.

Behind the scenes, Streamr’s open-source Monoplasma technology enables potentially hundreds of thousands of data providers to withdraw payments for their data from the single Ethereum smart contract that powers each Data Union. This was a world first, the first digital data union ever created.