In the past six months or so, Streamr has been working closely together with the newly established Data Union DAO to mutually support important upgrades in both projects.
For the uninitiated, Data Unions are a way to let crowds of people earn by sharing data, giving birth to new types of fairly crowdsourced datasets. The individual Data Union applications are launched by teams building on top of the Data Union Framework, which is built and governed by the Data Union DAO. Learn more about what Data Unions are here.
For decentralized data infrastructure like Streamr, data sharing and monetization are promising use cases, and Data Unions are killer apps within that space. 90% of existing and upcoming Data Union builders (such as DIMO and Swash) use the Streamr Network as their data transport layer and the Streamr Marketplace as a sales channel.
The updates in the technologies may seem subtle at first, but in this blog post I’ll cover them and their strategic importance in depth. For those of you with TL;DR syndrome:
- Marketplace is now compatible with Streamr Network’s Brubeck milestone
- Marketplace is now multi-chain and deployed on Polygon and Gnosis, for a start
- Marketplace payment token can be chosen freely
- Marketplace and Core UI supports Data Union Framework version 3.0
- Data Unions 3.0 is also now multi-chain and also available on Polygon and Gnosis
- Check the Data Union DAO blog for more details about the Data Unions upgrade
Marketplace changes
First of all, the Marketplace has been updated to be fully compatible with the current Brubeck milestone of the Streamr Network, launched earlier this year. While a previous version of the Marketplace has been available in the meanwhile, there was some technical debt in catching up the Marketplace dapp with the latest edition of the Network. That work is now complete.
The Marketplace is also now multi-chain. This means that when creating a data product, the seller chooses which chain they want to sell it on. Previously, the Marketplace only existed on Ethereum, which added barriers to its usage due to high gas fees. The updated Marketplace now launches on Polygon and Gnosis chains, with the possibility of bringing the functionality to more EVM-compatible chains in the future. For Streamr this offers new partnership opportunities with the various L1 and L2 chains out there, and users benefit from lower gas fees, broader composability, and reaching new audiences in those communities.
Sellers can also now freely choose the ERC-20 token they want to price the product in and receive payment in, while the previous version of the Marketplace only allowed products to be paid in the DATA token. DATA is still the default, but restricting sellers to it is unnecessary, as the true purpose of the DATA token is to power incentives in the Streamr Network and act as the governance token for the project. For those of you concerned about how this more liberal policy impacts the token economy: it doesn’t. It’s well established that a payment function has no lasting effect on the balance of demand and supply for the token. On the other hand, allowing more options is better for users, and Customer Is King.
The new Marketplace starts empty, and content will build up over time. To migrate products from the old (Corea) Marketplace, first make sure your data publishers are sending data in the Brubeck network, and then simply recreate your product on the Marketplace. Previous version 2.x Data Unions are compatible with the new Marketplace and can be imported once the data flows to Brubeck—please get in touch for assistance.
The Marketplace dapp is not just an opportunity for data monetization but also a content discovery tool, and publishers of open data are welcome to wrap their streams as free products on the Marketplace to showcase the content. This kind of content will become more common via upcoming Web3 collaborations. Featuring such open content will also feel more natural in the next iteration of Streamr dapp frontends, where the Marketplace and Core dapps will merge into Streamr Hub in advance of the Tatum milestone next year.
Data Union 3.0 framework changes
The upgrade makes things simpler for builders, and also achieves a similar strategic benefit as the Marketplace: the new architecture allows the Data Union DAO to partner with and expand the framework to various L1 and L2 chains in the future, tapping into the developer communities of each platform.
In a nutshell, the Data Union framework has streamlined. The 2.x versions involved the Mainnet and Gnosis chains for each Data Union, with complex bridging of tokens and messages across chains. The 3.0 release introduces Data Unions that exist on a single chain instead of two. On the other hand, for deploying a Data Union there is now a free choice of (that single) chain, allowing each Data Union project to deploy on the chain they prefer!
(So curiously, individual Data Unions changed from cross-chain to single-chain, while the framework itself went multi-chain! 🤯)
The Data Union framework also now has its own, dedicated client library available from npm! Consequently, starting from Streamr client version 7.0 (not yet released at the time of writing), the Streamr client will no longer contain the Data Union-related methods.
For more details about the Data Union 3.0 update, check out the Data Union DAO blog!
Putting the updates to the test
Over the weekend prior to Devcon in Bogotá in October, there will be a major hackathon ETHBogotá. Streamr will be attending together with the Data Union DAO and sponsoring $10,000 in prizes to builders of solutions involving one or both technologies. It will be fantastic to see what the hacker teams come up with, and what valuable feedback they will have on the latest releases!
If you make it to Devcon—be sure to give a shout on Twitter to Mark and Matthew from Team Streamr and Marlene from DU DAO. And if you aren’t lucky enough to make it to Bogotá, we invite you to try out the new tools and join the project Discord to ask questions and share feedback!
You are also invited to explore these upgrades in more depth for a Twitter Spaces AMA today (03.10.22) at 16:00 CET with the Streamr and Data Union DAO teams.
