DataBroker DAO
First Global Marketplace for Local Data

With its blue-green sea and white sands, the tropical climate of Boa Vista, in the Cape Verde archipelago, is a tourists’ hotspot. Boa Vista witnesses thousands of footfalls per week. However, this widespread tourism has resulted in significant concern regarding the island’s waste management system. Man-made wastes are randomly spread throughout the island, mostly in the vicinity of the resorts. Meanwhile, the island is also home to a huge colony of loggerhead turtles, which has their nests in the white sands of the beaches. Thus, increased plastic wastes are gradually toxifying their natural habitat. Aiming to help these endangered turtles, a group of volunteers, academicians, and an association of tech companies wanted a solution that can localize the trash spots, and collect local data reports on the clean-up campaigns. Their search for a suitable mobile crowdsensing solution provider led them to the world’s first marketplace for sensor data, DataBroker DAO. The association contracted crowdsensing.mobi, a member of the DataBroker DAO marketplace, to launch an initiative to collect text, audio, and video reports with GPS coordinates to optimize their clean-up campaigns. The DataBroker DAO claim and staking mechanisms helped the initiative in assuring the quality and integrity of the reports.

Today, individuals, companies, researchers, and governments make use of sensor data to optimize and monitor their operations. This trend has resulted in spending hundreds of billions of dollars yearly expenses for buying and maintaining IoT sensors. Despite the staggering growth in the investment and applications in IoT, often the collected data is for single purpose. “As a decentralized marketplace for IoT sensor data, we offer sensor owners an online marketplace to trade their single purpose sensor data and turn the data into a revenue stream,” says Matthew Van Niekerk, co-founder and CEO of DataBroker DAO.

The company has built its proprietary platform on a decentralized, open-source, blockchain-based distributed platform, Ethereum, combined with Data Share Contract (blockchain-based smart contract) to connect buyers and sellers of sensor data from all over the world. The smart contract is used to agree on the conditions on the use of seller’s data and the terms of payment.

Then the seller can trade the data using either a push or pull principle. In the push principle, the data is pushed to all buyers who have digitally signed the contract. On the other hand, in the pull principle, the platform provides the file location and the decryption key to all buyers participating in the contract.

DataBroker DAO’s marketplace platform is built to integrate with other significant players in the sensor data ecosystem (manufacturers and gateway operators) in a non-invasive way. Rather than projecting itself as a replacement to traditional data trading, the company is ensuring a low friction environment for the data traders. It focuses on being an integral component in the current and future ecosystem to ensure that in the future DataBroker DAO can co-exist, integrate, and complement next generation of distributed ledger systems in the IoT ecosystem, Streamr, and OceanProtocol. DataBroker DAO is also collaborating with several big data and smart data technology companies, integrators, and resellers to create and maintain an alliance. For instance, the company is a prestigious member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance—the Alliance for the Internet of Things Innovation—in Beltug and Agoria. These strategic partnerships help DataBroker DAO to stay at the forefront of the change. To conclude, Niekerk says, “Equipped with all the partners and resources, DataBroker DAO is driving the evolution toward truly ‘smart living’ by making sensor data easily accessible to cities, organizations, and entrepreneurs at an affordable price.