It’s been four months since Streamr and Minima announced their strategic partnership aimed at transforming the deployment of live data across decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN). This collaboration has already begun to reveal new use cases. Let’s dive into these emerging solutions and their implications for DePIN.
Table of Contents
Background
Together, Streamr and Minima are fundamental technologies within the expanding DePIN ecosystem, providing builders with a plug-and-play technology stack optimized for decentralized data.
Minima is a Layer 1 blockchain known for its lightweight architecture, which is ideal for enabling full nodes – that both construct and validate the blockchain – to run on mobile or IoT devices. Minima’s unique technology enhances its adaptability to scale DePIN solutions, including data authentication on the device itself, at the edge.
Complementing this, Streamr offers a robust data broadcasting protocol that enables the streaming of massive amounts of live data peer-to-peer at scale.
Barriers to Joining Decentralized Networks
No matter the quantity or distribution of nodes in a peer-to-peer network, if access to the network is controlled by a single entity, it remains centralized. This highlights a challenge faced by blockchains, that is – how to get new users to easily join the network in a decentralized way.
When a new user wishes to run a full Minima node, they need to know at least one other node ID to connect to the blockchain for the first time. Once connected, the peer-to-peer networking takes over, managing and maintaining connections with other nodes. This clearly introduces a barrier to entry, since it requires that a new node operator already knows someone on the network.
Minima’s initial solution involved a bootstrap phase, supplying a set of centrally run nodes that new node runners would automatically connect to, providing seamless entry to the network and access to the Minima blockchain.
This method, however, introduced a centralized gateway to an otherwise decentralized network. To overcome this, the automatic connection to their nodes was removed, introducing the barrier to entry for new node runners, who had to find a “peers list” (a list of public IP addresses of other nodes) in order to join.
Decentralization was achieved, but at the expense of convenience.
Deploying Streamr for Decentralized Peer Discovery
Peer lists are dynamic, since nodes may join and leave the network on their own schedule. Therefore, it is important that node runners obtain a recent list of peers when joining. Streamr’s decentralized network now enables Minima to publish an up-to-date list of randomly assignedpeers to a stream, giving node runners decentralized entry points into the Minima network.
This stream’s dynamic and highly available nature allows new Minima node runners to automatically join the network effortlessly, thus reducing the barrier to entry and further scaling the network without points of centralization.
The day Minima switched off its centrally run servers that facilitated automatic peer-to-peer connection, was notably dubbed “decentraday”— a reminder of the substantial design challenges that come with developing decentralized technologies compared to their centralized counterparts.
Integrating Streamr’s data streaming technology with Minima creates many interesting and exciting opportunities for both ecosystems. Peer discovery is just one of those, and we are already working on other areas of synergy, from decentralized streaming applications to automotive use-cases, to bring unique utility to our users.
As you can see with this case study, there are important developments and advances being made to enhance ease of use which will drive adoption of blockchain and DePIN technology. Stay tuned for future updates as the partnership develops, including adding Streamr to Minima MiniDapps, and an exciting motorsport and video streaming use case!
