(A transcript of the video follows below)
Transmission #1 — Streamr update
Hi, I’m Henri from Streamr. Welcome to the first episode of Transmission! This is a series of regular updates on the Streamr project. We decided to start with this home-made quality vlog because it’s so easy to make, but over time, it’s bound to become more sophisticated. We can also explore different formats like interviews, live AMAs, turn it into a podcast, and whatnot. But it’s important to get started with something, so let’s start.
The first thing I’d like to point out is that we have a product! We were surprised to find that some people in the community were unaware of this. Maybe we haven’t emphasised it enough in our recent communications. There’s over 2,400 users on the platform!
You can sign up by clicking the Create Account button in the main navigation on our website. Afterwards, you can just log in by clicking Sign In. You can use the platform, for example, to power applications with real-time data, or connect data to Ethereum smart contracts. There’s not much help material available yet, so it’s not so easy to get started, but we’ll work on that. Let me get back to that in a sec.
What’s happened since the token launch?
One month has passed since the token launch in October, and during that time three major things have happened:
- Airdrop: To raise awareness of the project, we airdropped 10 million DATAcoin to over 433,000 Ethereum addresses. At the current market price those tokens are worth around $750,000. When you go on etherscan and inspect an address, there’s a big chance you’ll note that there’s some DATAcoin there.
- Bitfinex: We’re humbled by the fact that one of the top exchanges in the world decided to list our token — it’s very encouraging to us that the token got to start from the top. Other major exchanges might follow the example set by Bitfinex, although the decision is completely up to them.
- Devcon3: The Devcon3 conference was held in the beginning of November in Cancun, Mexico. I gave a talk on Streamr in the peer-to-peer breakout track, also showing a live demo of the platform. My colleague Risto appeared in a joint talk about an inspiring, planet-saving use case for Streamr and the blockchain. We met old friends like the Golem guys, our advisors, and some of our major contributors, and also made a lot of new friends with opportunities ranging from use cases to R&D collaboration. Risto wrote a summary on Devcon3, which is available on our blog.
What do we plan to do next?
- Establish a communications team: In our team, we have developers, designers, we have guys in business development, but nobody dedicated to communications. In a crowdfunded project like ours, we see that transparency and communications is as important as delivering the product itself, so our goal is to be one of the best-communicating crypto projects out there. It will take some time to get there, but we’re already working with some experienced people to help us set up the team.
- Develop the marketplace: On the technical and design departments, we’re working on the marketplace. Looking at the stack of infrastructure and tools we set out to create, we have working (although centralised) versions of every piece of the puzzle except the marketplace. It will be built in phases. The first iteration will be a stream browser, like a catalogue, which allows you to discover free public streams and connect those to your applications using the Streamr Engine or our APIs. The next iteration will introduce payments in crypto, and allow you to put data up for sale yourself.
- Create video tutorials: In the beginning of this video, I mentioned that at the moment it’s not so easy to start using the platform. It’s still early days in terms of productisation. We’ll start a series of video tutorials teaching the basic steps like creating and starting a canvas, producing data to a stream, and interacting with an Ethereum smart contract. The video tutorials will also help emphasise the fact that we have a product that can be used today, which we think sets us apart from many other projects in this space.
That’s it! To follow the project more closely, follow us on Twitter, and join our community chat. We also recently opened a subreddit, and if you subscribe to our Youtube channel, you’ll get notifications for all our new videos.