Note: This report covers the period between January 1st and March 31st. Approximations are made if a transaction spans multiple quarters. Values are in USD unless specified otherwise.
Table of Contents
A Message from the Streamr Governance Council
The first quarter of 2026 was exceptionally challenging and required us to fully rework our focus and spending. While overall crypto valuations had already been in a steep crash for a year, the delisting of DATA from Binance in mid-February made the situation worse and pushed the token value down to new all-time lows. The project survives for now, and is still making progress, but the new market situation has multiple implications which we will cover here.
First of all, we are forced to rethink project funding. The token inflation-based funding program hardly produces meaningful revenue anymore, and therefore we have halted the SIP funding program under which tokens were previously released and sold to cover expenses. No tokens have been sold since the Binance delisting.
Due to the recent change in the project’s financial health, product development has naturally slowed and is not yet at a stage where it can generate revenue from paying customers. Consequently, the team’s focus has partially shifted from building the product to chasing funding opportunities. The approach we’re currently taking is applying to public grant programs (Switzerland, EU) potentially combined with a VC funding round. Note that the specific grant programmes are not named in this report in order to protect the integrity of active applications.
If successful, this will certainly move the needle and allow us to press the gas pedal again, but the process can be expected to take time, as there are only so many applicable grants each quarter and their decision processes take time.
The timing is right: the EU Council’s December 2025 Declaration on Digital Sovereignty and France’s January 2026 mandate to abandon US-owned communication platforms signal that European institutions are now actively procuring sovereign alternatives. Our grant applications make the case that Europe needs communication infrastructure that no foreign jurisdiction can compel to disclose, that no single point of failure can bring down, and that remains secure against emerging quantum threats — and that Streamr’s fully serverless, browser-native, post-quantum encrypted architecture is the independent and resilient platform that delivers all three. The first feedback from the grant organizations is expected in July.
The team is back to full-blown early startup mode, consisting of the core team Mark, Petri, Henri, and Nikke. In order to bring down the burn rate, this team is committed to working pro bono from May onwards until the project secures new funding. Some team members may need to seek contracting work on the side to support their livelihoods, but everyone remains committed to putting in the hours needed to secure funding and advance the product, and will continue in full-time mode as soon as new funding is secured.
With just a small team, product development is slow but not halted. Progress is still being made towards the multi-broadcaster milestone, which allows a range of use cases from teleconferencing to multiple speakers + audience.
We also recognize that some node operators may currently be operating at a loss due to the low token value. The tokenomics are self-correcting, but it unfortunately means that the non-profitable operators may leave, which improves the profitability of the remaining operators. We can hope that the low value of rewards is a temporary situation. Even if the token value does not improve per se, eventually paying customers for Streamr App will increase the value paid out to operators and create demand.
In summary, we are down but not dead, and things may well look more positive once the product milestone is reached, with new funding potentially down the road, paving the way for product-generated organic revenue – the ultimate goal in project sustainability.
Key achievements
Streamr App Alpha launched (January 30) at tv.streamr.network/alpha — the first public release of the security-first, serverless video conferencing application built on the Streamr P2P network.
Alpha v2.0 delivered (Q1) — an improved version that now reliably hosts multi-party video conferences over the peer-to-peer network without central media servers, addressing stability and performance issues from v1.
Beta soft-launched via live Build in Public stream (March 11) — the team broadcast a session live from the Streamr App with restream to YouTube, demonstrating the platform’s broadcasting and restream capability in a real-world setting.
SDK bundle size reduced by 25% — all network monorepo packages refactored for proper environment separation, achieving zero polyfills across browsers, bundlers, and Node.js. Minimised SDK bundle dropped from ~5MB to ~3.7MB — a meaningful DX milestone.
Streamr Network functionality offloaded to Web Workers — the code accessing the Streamr network was moved off of the main thread, reducing UI blocking and improving real-time performance.
Encrypted recording with S3 storage — end-to-end encrypted recording implemented, including encrypted thumbnail generation and support for 1hr+ video files.
Two grant applications submitted — positioning the Streamr App as sovereign, resilient communication infrastructure for European institutions.
Formation of Swiss advisory panel — established a new advisory group comprising predominantly Swiss academic, military, and broadcasting contacts to provide strategic guidance and domain expertise.
Project financials
- $86,934 USD was raised from the sale of 20,921,2199 DATA tokens at an average price of around $0.004 per token. The last tokens were sold on February 6th 2026, and since then the selling has been stopped for the foreseeable future.
- 399,792 DATA generated in network protocol fees this quarter.
- At the end of Q1 the project’s cash reserve was approximately $232,290. This is down from $490,000 in Q4. As the token sales were halted in February, since then the project has been spending down the cash reserve.
- 70M DATA are remaining under the SIP-24 program, but as the token sales were halted, there is currently no planned spending of these tokens.
- The circulating supply stands at around 1.33B DATA. The project’s token reserve is approximately 530M DATA unallocated, plus the 70M DATA allocated for SIP-24.
Governance checkpoint projections
The next funding checkpoint SIP was previously projected for mid-2026. However, spending the SIP tokens has been halted for the time being. Therefore, no new allocations from the reserve are projected for the time being.
Project expenses
The overall spending in Q1 was $391k, notably down from the Q4 figure of $532k. This is because the project started strongly cutting its costs during Q1 in order to adapt to the changed market conditions.
The previously stated goal was to reduce the monthly burn to sub-$100k level by the end of Q1, and this was indeed accomplished. In March, the spend was $87k. Unlike previously planned though, due to the latest circumstances we will need to press the project expenses further down, in order to preserve cash and allow enough time to seek new project financing.
| Month | Admin | Business | Leadership | Legal | Overheads | Tech |
| 1 / 2026 | 5,816 | 64,869 | 14,341 | 0 | -6,775 | 78,610 |
| 2 / 2026 | 11,205 | 36,616 | 11,003 | 0 | 3,797 | 84,211 |
| 3 / 2026 | 6,502 | 34,632 | 4,828 | 0 | 3,797 | 37,682 |
| Total | 23,522 | 124,238 | 30,171 | 0 | 818 | 179,076 |
Spending category contents:
Admin: HR, accounting, bookkeeping, offices, utilities, financial services.
Business: Bizdev & marketing team salaries, ad and campaign expenses, events.
Leadership: Project leadership salaries.
Legal: Legal and compliance fees.
Overheads: Insurance, mandatory pension payments, taxes.
Tech: Developer salaries, product UX/UI designers, software licenses and cloud services.
Locked/staked supply
The amount of locked tokens decreased from 93.4M to 74.3M DATA representing a roughly -20% decrease in the amount of tokens locked in Operators and Sponsorships from the start of the quarter to the end of the quarter. During the quarter, there was not only the market panic, but also a disruption in the flow of reward tokens which temporarily reduced staked tokens, which then normalized.
DATA tokens staked on stream Sponsorships. Source: https://dune.com/streamr/dashboard
Node Operators
| Issuance event | Start date | Static sponsorships (DATA) | Dynamic sponsorships (DATA) | Total Issuance (DATA) |
| 25 | 2026-01-10 | 1,000,000 | 1,500,000 | 2,500,000 |
| 26 | 2026-02-12 | 1,000,000 | 1,500,000 | 2,500,000 |
A growing allocation of operator rewards are distributed via dynamic sponsorships created by the Streamr App. They are shorter in duration and appear frequently, as they are created when users stream on the application. Operators can leverage the autostaker to automatically react to new sponsorships and capture rewards from dynamically generated sponsorships. Consequently, allocation to static manually created sponsorships is declining and will be gradually phased out during Q2/2026.
Between March 16th and April 1st there was an unintended gap in static sponsorships. Static issuance – although deprecated as explained above – was resumed again on April 1st.
Active (staked) node operators were 159 at the start of the quarter, dropping to 93 by the end of the quarter – a notable 41% drop. Many operators most likely became non-profitable due to the price crash, or decided to panic sell their DATA positions. This consolidation is an expected part of the self-correcting tokenomics in the case that the token price goes down, boosting the profitability of remaining operators.
Token Disclosures
The company Streamr Network AG owns 261.6M DATA. The company bought tokens during the quarter, marking a notable increase in holdings compared to 139.3M DATA at the end of Q4. The company is owned and controlled by project founders and early investors.
While the company has the right to participate in governance voting just like any other token holder, since May 2021 the company has voluntarily abstained from voting to avoid dominating the votes and let smaller token holders’ voices be better heard.
Governance updates
There were no new governance proposals during the quarter.
GitHub Activity
Most Streamr code repositories are public, meaning that there is full visibility to the work happening therein. However, the development focus at the moment is on Streamr App and its main repository called streamrtv, which is not public. For visibility into the work happening in this repository, we include this section to offer a view into the development activity in the private repository.
Risks and Challenges
Adoption
Q1 marked the launch of the Streamr App Alpha on January 30th, alongside a number of supporting features including encrypted recording with S3 storage, in-call P2P messaging and a fiat payment rail. While these represented meaningful product milestones, the product is not yet at a stage where it can be taken to market commercially, and the previously planned Beta launch has been delayed.
Following the delisting of the DATA token from Binance in mid-February, the project’s strategic focus shifted from adoption and go-to-market activities to recapitalisation. Grant applications to Swiss and EU public funding programmes, potentially combined with a VC funding round, have become the primary workstream and have required significant time and resource commitment from the core team.
The dedicated marketing and growth teams have been disbanded as part of broader cost reduction measures, and marketing activities have been ramped down, as previously communicated to the community via Discord. The project is currently in a transitional period, which is expected to continue through Q2.
As a consequence, active adoption and growth initiatives have been paused for the quarter. Once new funding is secured, marketing and growth functions will be reinstated alongside product launches as they come to market. While the strategic direction established in Q4 remains unchanged, the near-term priority is to secure the financial foundation needed to execute on that vision.
Technical challenges
The technical goal of Q1 was making the product feature-complete and production ready on all target platforms (Desktop/iOS/Android browsers). The first target of feature-completeness was reached, but technical challenges were faced in making the system production ready on mobile devices. Especially the poor performance of the mobile Safari browser, such as the hard limit on number of available WebCodecs VideoDecoders, was only discovered in the tests with high numbers of participants during this quarter. Implementing and testing workarounds for the mobile platforms has delayed our progress, but we foresee that the work will be completed during Q2.
Security vulnerabilities or incidents
There have been no consequential security incidents.
Legal or regulatory updates
There have been no consequential legal or regulatory incidences.
If you have any questions about this transparency report, feel free to ask in the governance channel on the Streamr Discord.
