tl;dr: DIMO launched and will support the first Data Union for real-time vehicle data. We’re building an extensible, scalable open IoT software platform that allows drivers to stream their vehicle data in exchange for tokens. On top of that will exist a trustless, accessible developer ecosystem where car owners can maximize the value of their connected assets’ data and functionality. We’re excited to build with the Streamr team and to become a pillar in the Streamr community for years to come.
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Intro: The DIMO EV Data Union
A few months ago, we launched the first Data Union with real-time vehicle data as a proof of concept. That DIMO Data Union is a part of the platform we’re building in support of our mission—to advance how devices help people connect with and move throughout the world. We’re deep believers that the most important technology in our lives should be built open source. And so we’re building DIMO that will allow you to own devices that work for you, not just the companies that built them.
How we’re using Streamr
It’s part of our values to build DIMO in the open with open source components like AutoPi, IPFS, OpenDBC, Streamr and Filecoin—this approach will unlock levels of transparency, neutrality, privacy, authenticity, and reliability that were previously impossible in IoT networks.
And we see Streamr in particular as a key component of our future stack, on both the data ingestion and data monetization side. Before Streamr existed, transferring data was a centralized affair which usually used AWS/Azure/GCP IoT services to send data from a car to a centralized point. While this approach is scalable, it misses the mark on all the categories we mentioned above—categories we see as essential values.
Utilizing Streamr’s open source node architecture allows us to innovate on this formula and turn every device into a publish/subscribe node on the network. Beyond that, on the data monetization side, we are utilizing Streamr’s unique Data Unions framework which allows anyone to subscribe to the data with a few simple clicks in metamask.
Crypto grants can actually work!
Our relationship with Streamr was a major turning point for DIMO. We had incubated the idea for DIMO over several months (or really years, depending on how far back you want to draw the lines) but we had no real market validation for the concepts we had been working on. Amongst the very first actions we took to share DIMO with the world was to apply for a grant from Streamr to create the first real-time vehicle data union.
With the grant, and more importantly the success of the work a few weeks later, we had increased our conviction to drive forward. It ended up being one of a few key events that led DIMO to go all-in on our web3 vision and to trim out ideas that would have kept us more in the web2 world. We’re definitely grateful to the Streamr team (Matthew Fontana, Henri Pihkala, and many others) for that. Since then we’ve benefited from technical expertise, and we’re deepening our relationship with Streamr (more on that soon).
Becoming a pillar of the greater Streamr ecosystem
Achieving our collective web3 goals is going to be a collaborative and community-driven effort across DAOs. Tokens provide a means to align incentives and orchestrate activity in communities, and we’ll also need to work across meta-communities (DAO to DAO, ecosystem to ecosystem). Our community and the Streamr community overlap in two key ways:
- User-related: for example, a contributing member of a data union like Swash’s may also be interested in a data union like DIMO’s, or
- Tech-related: DIMO is collaborating with Streamr and Ceramic Network to develop a set of tools that enable all Data Union operators to quickly and easily enable new data monetization streams from real world assets
To be the best contributor to the greater ecosystem, we will aim to contribute along both avenues, encouraging DIMO users to discover new Data Unions to participate in and open-sourcing valuable technology that improves the technology used by all.
Get involved with DIMO
We’re working on our mobile application so that soon you will be able to connect your car and begin storing and sharing your own vehicle data with the DIMO Data Union. For now, you can sign up for a DIMO account and add a vehicle (or vehicles) to the waitlist. We’ll notify users when we’re ready to begin accepting them, and this may depend on both waitlist position and the type of car they have.
If you want to join the DAO and community, you can find us in DIMO’s Discord Server. We’re also looking for the car hackers and tinkerers around the world who have been working to decipher DBC codes and improve car data accessibility. We’d like to see you in the DIMO world too.
Learn more about Data Unions
- Discover Data Unions
- Documentation: Intro to Data Unions
- Data Union DAO
Originally published: https://medium.com/dimo-network/digital-infrastructure-for-moving-objects-dimo-4944a49da22d
