We shipped code, joined events, held talks, sponsored hackathons and helped our little ecosystem develop and flourish. Here are some of our favorite milestones and news that we have enjoyed creating and reading about.
Streamr devs upgraded the Data Unions smart contracts to version 3 making the code EVM compatible and launching the smart contracts on Polygon. With that, we are looking into expanding the smart contracts to new L1 and L2 developer communities.
Most recently, we released a new much requested feature: weighted revenue distribution. Devs can now assign weights to Data Union members to distribute weighted token rewards – more on that in our docs.
The Swash Data Union smart contract crossed 500,000 transactions on Gnosis chain and Swash onboarded over 320,000 members from around the world.
“Streamr’s Data Union technology inspired the creation of the Swash app back in 2019. Now, Swash is thriving, with a community that are passionate about owning their data and the impact they can have on the future of the internet. The solution made possible with Streamr and their Data Union smart contracts, plus the support they’ve shown since day one, has been invaluable to the success of Swash and the evolution of the broader Web3 data economy.” – Chloë Diamond, CMO at Swash
Swash also partnered with DataHive DAO, two parties in the Streamr & Data Union DAO ecosystem, to ship sIntelligence – delivering market insights by utilizing Swash member data.
Another highlight in 2022 has been to work with the core team at DIMO. DIMO is one of the hottest web3 startups that has been covered by Polygon, Messari, and CoinDesk to name a few – and it all started with a grant from Streamr.
“Streamr gave us a grant and in a couple of weeks, we had sent data from one of these AutoPi devices to a Streamr Data Union. At that point in time we realized that the tech problem is solved.” – Alex Rawitz, co-founder at DIMO
After experimenting with Streamr and Data Unions for their proof of concept DIMO raised $9m in seed funding, connected over 5,000 cars to their network, and launched their mainnet and token rewards in December – distributing a total of 6.75% of the total DIMO supply to early drivers that contributed data to the DIMO Network.
DUs, PoPW, TIPIN or DePIN? What do all of these abbreviations have in common? They aim to describe the trend of utilizing token incentives for growing physical infrastructure networks.
While Data Unions don’t differentiate between physical and digital infrastructure networks, they all utilize token incentives for growing networks. Networks of people and devices that are connected and serve a mutual goal.
The most recent new term that aims to describe this growing ecosystem is called DePIN: Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks, which has been introduced by Messari Crypto around November 2022. DePIN has even made it into Messari’s Crypto Thesis for 2023 – as one of the top 10 trends to watch out for in web3. DIMO has also been mentioned in many of these reports, including the Drive-to-Earn Pro report and the DePIN sector map, both published by Messari Crypto.
DePIN is a new take on TIPIN, which stands for Token Incentivized Physical Infrastructure Networks and was introduced by Lattice Capital in July 2022, which they describe as crypto’s next big thing. They describe the TIPIN sector as projects leveraging token incentives that meets real world demand.
Prior to TIPIN, we have Multicoin Capital releasing their Proof of Physical Work (PoPW) thesis in April 2022. PoPW refers to “protocols that (…) incentivize people to do verifiable work that builds real-world infrastructure”. And again we are looking at the utilization of token incentives for people to do verifiable work, like to connect a dapp to your car or browser.
Data Unions, in contrary to all of the new terms above, was first published by Streamr Network in 2020 and has been in development as early as 2019. Whether the industry will establish itself as DUs, DePIN or co – the naming is secondary, what is important is that there is a growing trend which means there will be a growing need for infrastructure to issue out token incentives – middleware that is customizable, scalable and secure – exactly what the Data Unions smart contracts and SDK offers.
We evaluated similar spin-offs like Safe and CoW that spun out from Gnosis and decided that in order to increase our longevity we needed to increase our treasury. Thanks to a Streamr community vote we were able to make this change happen.
Last year we participated in many events spreading the news about Data Unions Swash and DIMO around the world. We held a panel at ETH Denver together with two co-founders of DIMO, gave a talk in Paris during ETH CC, co-sponsored the Hackathon together with Streamr during ETHGlobal Bogota and were invited to speak at the Helium House in NYC alongside the Filecoin Foundation – to name a few.
We have also had the pleasure of being mentioned by Helium core devs in the Helium blog article Streamr x Helium, and Data Unions might just be the perfect match that utilizes both technologies.
The Data Unions concept receives more industry recognition – this time by Outlier Ventures, one of the biggest web3 accelerators, who have established Data Unions as one of their investment categories.
Whether 2023 will be the year of the bear or bull – we’ll keep building and shipping code to contribute to the decentralized, permissionless and censorship resistant web.If you are building in the DePIN, TIPIN or Data Unions space, make sure to join our discord and connect with our team. We have grants and a team to help with any technical questions about how you can implement the Data Unions smart contracts for your project.
]]>Token incentives are as old as Bitcoin, miners provide computing power and earn BTC in return. Similarly, the Ethereum network has incentive structures in place for validators that stake ETH to secure the network.
Token incentives are a powerful tool for crowdsourcing actions to achieve a common goal.
A network (protocol or other entity) rewards people for executing a certain behavior that benefits the network. The participants earn tokens in return to achieve the goal of the network.
The Helium blockchain rewards people for running hotspots that provide wireless coverage and verify the Helium Network. Hotspot providers are rewarded in Helium’s HNT token.
The Streamr network rewards people for running nodes that provide bandwidth to the network and enable a real-time data transport layer. Node operators are rewarded in Streamr’s DATA token.
The DIMO network rewards people for connecting their vehicles that crowdsources vehicle data. Drivers are rewarded in DIMO’s DIMO token.
The structure and issuance of token incentives vary vastly from one organization to another. And designing token incentives and the economics around them can become a long-winded process that can take up a lot of time and resources.
To speed up the process, the Data Union DAO offers an out-of-the-box solution that enables organizations to issue (micropayment) token rewards to their users.
One major benefit of using the Data Unions smart contracts or SDK is that the end users do not have to be crypto native or have an understanding of what the blockchain is in order to participate.
When a new user joins a Data Union a self-sovereign wallet is created in the background enabling the user to own and hold their own tokens – this enables organizations to onboard mainstream users into crypto.
Another benefit to issuing token rewards via a blockchain is that anyone anywhere can participate, the financial layer is not bound to geographic limitations enabling organizations to achieve faster go to markets globally.
There are several angles around token incentives, and the most notable ones are from the Lattice Fund and Multicoin Capital.
Lattice defines projects that have existing real world demand that leverage token incentives for the development and deployment of non-fungible physical infrastructure as TIPIN, which stands for Token Incentivized Physical Infrastructure Networks.
Similarly, Multicoin defines their thesis as Proof of Physical Work, which refers to projects that utilize a token to incentivize people to do verifiable work that builds real world infrastructure.
It’s clear that a trend around token incentives and the real world is emerging and that we are going to see more and more projects utilizing token incentives in order to build out physical (and digital) infrastructure networks.
We at Data Union DAO refer to organizations that utilize token incentives as Data Unions, and see our framework as a blueprint for creating new “x-to-earn” business models. So far, three startups using our tech (Swash, DIMO, Unbanx) have raised a total of $30m.
]]>How do you incentivize the creation of real-world physical infrastructure? And what role does decentralized digital technology, like the Streamr Network and the Data Union framework, play in that?
Together with DU DAO contributor and Head of Ecosystems of Streamr, Matt Fontana, we were invited to speak at this year’s Helium House in New York City. Alongside Danny O’Brian from the Filecoin Foundation and Ariel Seidman from Hivemapper, we embark on demystifying token incentives.
Panel starting at 1:56:40.”web3 represents a big paradigm shift in terms of user-owned infrastructure and the ability of users to own and permission their data” – Scott Sigel, Helium Foundation, as he welcomes the panelists to the stage. Find answers to questions like why we did decide on a token in the video.
Our technology, the Data Union framework, is built on Streamr Network and works in tandem with Ethereum to offer developers the tools necessary to create incentive mechanisms for crowdsourcing and monetizing user data.
The Streamr Network is used for connecting digital applications or physical IoT devices with the developers’ “Data Union” – a smart contract that crowdsources data from users in order to negotiate higher prices for data sales and other benefits for their users. The Data Union smart contract also offers payment rails that make sending micro crypto rewards to millions of users financially and technically feasible.
Users that join a Data Union become on-chain members and approve the organization running the smart contracts with the right to monetize their data on their behalf – all while retaining privacy through end-to-end encryption.
But wait – there is more to the tech. Not only can you now incentivize the crowdsourcing and monetization of user data. You can make using your application even more effortless by removing the friction that the wallet creation process introduces.
What if we skipped setting up a wallet when onboarding new users into your application while retaining the benefits for users to have self-sovereign control over their data and money?
This is possible by utilizing the Data Union DAO’s client. Automatically create a wallet per user where their private key is stored on the users device – never connecting it to the internet for security reasons.
Don’t know how to code smart contracts in Solidity? No problem. On top of the Data Union smart contracts sits an SDK written in JavaScript that enables more developers to incentivize data crowdsourcing and monetization.
DIMO utilizes the Data Union framework for crowdsourcing vehicle data. Alex Rawitz from DIMO presented DIMO, a user-owned mobility focused IoT platform, at TIPIN Summit. TIPIN stands for Token Incentivized Physical Infrastructure Networks which is highlighting the emergence of user owned incentive networks for building and incentivizing data crowdsourcing – an integral part of the growing new data economy.
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