The Decentralization of Real-time Data
At Bitcoin Wednesday on 6 September, 2017, Streamr’s CEO Henri Pihkala will give an update on the project since his last visit to Bitcoin Wednesday for the 4th Anniversary Edition in July. This time he will be joined by his colleague, COO Risto Karjalainen, Ph.D. from Wharton, an ex-quant who previously worked for J.P. Morgan and Merrill Lynch in London.
Henri writes:
“A lot has happened in a few months: We have announced an official collaboration with Golem. We will talk about that as well as how we think collaboration in the sector will lead to a new kind of application development toolkit. By September 6 we will also have announced the crowd sale of DATAcoin, the token that powers the Streamr Network.”
Streamr is a decentralized infrastructure for real-time data that is integrated with Ethereum. The project was established in 2014 to solve problems in real-time infrastructure and analytics.
The vision of Streamr’s Helsinki-based team is to help people solve problems by combining data sources in innovative and insightful ways. In the future, they believe, decentralized applications will be powered by real-time decentralized data. “For the past year or so,” says Henri, “We’ve been excited about blockchain technologies, its future implications on data delivery, security, and new business models, and have been exploring how to contribute to the available infrastructure and tools in the blockchain sector based on our specific background.”
Some examples Henri gives are stock trading, vehicle fleet tracking, factory automation and even air traffic control. These are cases he says would benefit from resistance to distributed denial-of-service attacks and improved transparency and security that integration with blockchain technology provides.
Streamr’s mission is to build a scalable, low-latency, decentralized stack for real-time data. At the base of the technology stack is a peer-to-peer messaging network that can verify the provenance of data. To allow for scalability, the network operates as a data layer on top of the blockchain. To provide for incentivization and permissioning, Streamr is powered by a token called DATAcoin. At the top of the stack, Streamr offers tools based on visual programming for off-chain stream computing, analytics, and real-time integrations. Additional analytics can be performed by a decentralized computing provider such as Golem.
According to Henri:
Streamr’s messaging network enables monetization of data, for which propose to build a data marketplace. Anyone — individuals, organizations and machines — would be able to put data streams up for sale so that subscribers can easily consume them via the network. We aim to make the line between off-chain and on-chain computation completely seamless to the user.
A prototype of the analytics and visual programming environment for distributed cloud computing is already available. Next we’ll start working on the decentralization of the infrastructure.
Henri Pihkala is a software engineer, a serial entrepreneur, and ex algorithmic trader. He has led the development of two high-frequency algorithmic trading platforms and designed and managed building the distributed Streamr cloud analytics platform. Next he wants to see real-time data tokenized and decentralized. Henri is passionate about complex architecture, scalability, data, and the blockchain.
The Streamr platform is up and running, a beta version with Ethereum integrations at eth.streamr.com, and users can sign up and start using it right now.
The following video explains Streamr in two minutes.
Streamr now also has a blog, and the Streamr white paper is available here.
