Table of Contents
What is Streamr?
Streamr is an open-source project creating a platform and tools for the world’s real-time data to be owned and traded by those who produce it.
Streamr will do this by building a p2p Network for transporting real-time data around the globe. On top of this sits a data Marketplace, Data Unions for aggregated trading of data produced by individuals, and the Core app with other tools for people, organisations, and machines to process and distribute data with ease.
The Streamr Tech Stack
The Network
Real-time data will travel through a decentralized pub/sub Network hosted on computers around the globe. The Network is a scalable, low-latency transport layer, built for dApps, smart devices such as IoT sensors or connected cars, and data streams on the Marketplace. It will be supported by nodes who earn DATA tokens in exchange for the bandwidth and validation they provide. We think this is a crucial protocol for Web3.
The Network is currently at its Corea milestone, which launched at Devcon 5 this year. Watch the launch highlights!
The Marketplace
The Marketplace is a web-based application to trade real-time data streams. Providers publish streams and consumers subscribe and pay for access. Terms of use, the price schedule, and time-based access control are coded in Ethereum smart contracts.
Data Unions
A Data Union is a framework, currently being built on the Streamr Marketplace, that allows people to easily bundle and sell their real-time data and earn revenue. On its own, our data does not hold much value, but when combined in a Data Union, it aggregates into an attractive product for buyers to extract insights. Revenue sharing mechanics (see Monoplasma) means that when these products sell, all contributors automatically receive payment.
This is crowdselling, and has the potential to generate unique data sets by incentivising trade directly from the data producers.
The first example is the Swash plugin, built by community devs based in Turkey, for users to monetise their browser data. Try the beta now and start earning in seconds!
Check out the examples of crowdselling data with Streamr:
- The Swash app Data Union for users to monetize their browser data
- Tracey app for sustainable seafood data trade
- Machine witness demo of the “Internet of Cars”
Streamr Core
Streamr Core is a web based interactive platform to create or subscribe to data streams and visualise, analyse, and easily prototype real-time data without the need to set up back end infrastructure. Users can also combine data streams, and connect real-world events to trigger smart contracts. Core uses web3 sign-in, payment, and identity management processes.
Try the app today!
Engine
Processing raw data needs an Engine for it to be aggregated, filtered, or combined with other data to extract its value. The Engine is built to deal with high volumes of information and accept data from a wide variety of sources including financial exchanges, IoT devices, and social media.
Monoplasma
Monoplasma is a special-purpose off-chain scaling solution for one-to-many payments. It was originally created to enable the Community Products feature on the Streamr Marketplace. It is now openly licensed for anyone to utilise.
A Brief History of Streamr
Streamr was started because most services on the internet, and particularly on the web, are run by tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook.
The project founders believe that creating decentralized infrastructure and a decentralized data economy can deliver a healthier distribution of money and power, as well as unlocking brand new use cases. Streamr’s role and purpose in this big picture is to build the technology that covers the real-time data niche of this decentralized infrastructure, especially for the purposes of the decentralized web and internet of things.
Streamr is following a predefined roadmap as set out in the 2017 whitepaper. This process will take four-to-five years to complete. The Streamr approach is incremental decentralization: starting from a centralized but feature-complete system, and building new versions with less and less centralization over time.
Founding team members come from a financial backgrounds, being either quants, trading system developers, algorithmic traders and, in some cases, all of the above. Streamr’s devs have a variety of backgrounds relating to networking, infrastructure, data systems and crypto experience. Check out the meet the team videos!
While developing the platform, the team engages with developers and companies to explore use cases and promote adoption of the technology. There is a regularly updated public Trello to follow the progress made towards each milestone.
In October 2019, Streamr launched TX, a newly established company tasked with enterprise level consultancy for adoption of the Streamr tech stack.
Where can you find Streamr?
Streamr HQ is in Zug, Switzerland and the TX team is based in Helsinki, Finland. Many other contributors work remotely across the globe.
You can follow the project and discussions on: Reddit, Twitter, Medium, YouTube, LinkedIn, Peepeth, Blockfolio Signal.
The best place to interact with the team and other community members directly is on Telegram or Reddit. The team post regular updates and there’s usually someone there to answer any questions.
As well as English, there are currently dedicated community moderated Telegram groups for German, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, and Portuguese languages. There is also a minimal Telegram announcements group and an unofficial channel run by the community.
Developer Resources
The open source nature of the project means a lot of resources are available for the Streamr developer community.
The developer documentation on the main site contains most of the information to get started.
The Dev Community Forum is a good place to explore to see some of the integrations being built, find the latest bounty proposals, discussions, or propose a project and get funded to build it by the Community Fund.
Streamr Github, Javascript Streamr Client, newly released MVP Java Streamr Client, the API explorer, and monthly dev updates are other useful resources.
Tutorials
There are many tutorials saved to the Streamr Medium page, including how to:
- Connect your data to the Streamr Marketplace
- Build your own smart fridge
- Integrate Streamr with Apache Spark
- Build air quality based smart contract apps
- Deploy Monoplasma for one-to-many payments
And there is a whole YouTube playlist that covers the basics of using the Streamr stack.
Project Examples and case studies
For inspiration, here are some of the recent projects built by the Streamr dev community:
- The Swash app Data Union for users to monetize their browser data
- Tracey app for sustainable seafood data trade
- Machine witness demo of the “Internet of Cars”
- Spotify Data Union demo
- Consolidated air position streams from over 10,000 locations on the Marketplace
- Sell your Fitbit data
In advance of Community Products, Streamr would like to fund more real-time data stream integrations to the Marketplace. You can find or submit a proposal directly or contact Head of Developer Outreach, Weilei Yu, on Telegram, the community dev forum, or by email: weilei.yu@streamr.com.
Join the Community
The community is key for reaching the Streamr goal and there are a lot of ways to get involved. Here is a list of the #8 best ways you can engage.
You can read more about Streamr from a community perspective and how to get involved in this post from Telegram member, “Pocketchange”.
Community Fund
The Community Fund is backed by 2,000,000 in DATA tokens to help implement ideas with some resources at the community’s disposal. Community Fund projects can be picked up and proposed on the Community Dev Forum.
Reading list
Whitepaper
Explainer vid
Website
Learn about the Sreamr Network
What are Data Unions?
Dev docs
Dev Tutorials
Introducing Crowdselling
Video playlist
Building the Missing Protocol of Today’s Internet Stack: a Decentralized Pub/Sub Network for Realtime Data
The Internet of Cars: Unlocking the Value of Vehicle Data
Unlocking the benefits of vehicle data: Solving data limitations in the transport industry
How to Crowdsell Your Information Through a Data Union
The Streamr Community Fund!
Launching TX for Enterprise Adoption of the Streamr Stack
