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The crypto market is on the rise again. After crashing to a low of $6,000 in early February, Bitcoin is back above the $10,000 level and many of the major alt coins are doing well again. A massive correction was due since the market had been particularly exuberant since the closing months of 2017.
Now, investors are expected to approach investing with more caution. Most may have been trading mainly on speculation but fundamentals have to come into play sooner rather than later. Investors would do well paying attention to the companies behind these crypto tokens and the industries they seek to disrupt as these to will in the future success of these coins.
Savvy investors should already look into emerging and potentially high-growth industries. The Internet-of-Things (IoT), for instance, may seem like a buzzword thrown around to refer to how thermostats can now be controlled by phones and how refrigerators can tell when a gallon of milk is going bad.
However, IoT is now more than just these gimmicky consumer applications. Smart devices and sensors have been making their way to industrial and commercial apps. Gartner projects that more than 11 billion devices will be connected to the IoT in 2018. McKinsey also expects the IoT to generate over $11 trillion in economic value a year by 2025. Given that these devices are rich sources of data, the IoT will inevitably be a battleground for many businesses.
This hasn’t escaped the attention of several blockchain ventures hoping to capitalize on the IoT market’s potential. A couple of notable crypto-meets-IoT projects are IOTA and Streamr. IOTA is a distributed ledger project that aims to promote interoperability among devices. Streamr is a blockchain-based data marketplace that seeks to better connect IoT data owners and data consumers.
Data is now considered the “new oil” and it would be key for any IoT project to assert influence over how IoT data can be accessed and transacted. Given the increasing acceptance of blockchain technology across verticals, these two projects have the potential to become dominant players in the IoT space.
IOTA
It has been a challenge to maximize the utility of IoT data especially those gathered by industrial devices. McKinsey also reports that, for one case, only 1 percent of data gathered in one industrial site is ever analyzed. This underscores how underutilized IoT data can be. Yet, smart devices could benefit from the open exchange of information. Devices are typically designed to function better when fed timely information. To solve this, IOTA aims to create a decentralized and scalable means for IoT devices to become interoperable.
Central to IOTA’s proposition is its Tangle architecture. Tangle makes IOTA unique compared to other crypto projects since it is a “blockless” ledger. With traditional blockchains, transactions are group together in a block which are then verified by miners at set intervals. Tangle does this differently. Each transaction in the Tangle verifies two other transactions. This takes out the need for miners. The more it is used, the more transactions the Tangle can verify. As such, IOTA transactions aren’t subject to the hefty miners fees that plague blockchain-based cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
For IoT, having such a means to facilitate transactions creates numerous possibilities. IOTA transactions promise to be cheap and speedy making the platform ideal for devices. Among its potential use cases is to allow IoT devices to transact with each other. For instance, smart thermostats may be able to “pay” to get out real-time information from weather sensors so that they can effectively regulate room temperatures.
Image Source: CoinMarketCap
However, IOTA isn’t without its share of critics. Some have expressed concern that transacting and storing large volumes of IoT data on the Tangle may expose its scalability issues. Running a full node that keeps track of all the transactions may require additional computing resources that most IoT devices don’t have. Because there are no miners, there are only a select number of participants that operate full IOTA nodes. A DDoS attack to the IOTA network last year emphasized the need for additional full nodes on the network.
Currently, IOTA is the 10th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization with a cap of $5.7 billion. Investors must take note that the total supply for IOTA 2.8 quadrillion tokens. Transactions in exchanges are done in MIOTA or million IOTA tokens. The challenge for IOTA is gaining wider adoption and its collaboration with the likes of Microsoft, Cisco, Samsung, Volkswagen, and Fujitsu helps buoy IOTA’s profile.
Streamr
Streamr aims to open up access to data by focusing more on democratizing access to real-time data. It provides a data backbone that allows data sources including IoT devices to stream information to other apps. Data owners can simply connect to a node on a decentralized peer-to-peer network and start streaming. Data consumers can then readily access data by paying using Streamr’s DATACoin (DATA) token. Peers who contribute bandwidth to the network also earn DATA. The platform uses the Ethereum blockchain to manage monetization and smart contracts.
Streamr focuses on delivering timely information to devices and apps rather than collecting and storing data into a blockchain. This approach not only enables apps to work better due to the availability of live real-time information, it also helps curb the need to handle IoT data storage. Transacting large volumes of IoT data on a blockchain (or the Tangle in IOTA’s case) can potentially cause issues which include hefty mining fees, slower confirmation times, or the need for additional storage and computing resources especially for full node operators.
The Streamr platform also features a streaming analytics layer that can distill raw data and transform it to something more usable to apps and prevents devices from making decisions based on dated and irrelevant information.
Currently, only large enterprises are capable of collecting and managing big data. Access to big data often comes at a cost and is only available if these companies are willing to part with theirs. This limits the capability of smaller developers and companies to be able to use data to improve their offerings and boost the value they could bring to their respective customers. Streamr also has a decentralized marketplace component that challenges this prevalent model of data ownership. Prices will inevitably become more accessible as more data owners to participate.
Streamr is a relatively new entrant to the cryptocurrency market. DATA is within the top 200 coins in the market capitalization list with a total market cap of nearly $85 million. There is a total supply of 987 million DATA. DATA has only been trading since November. Unlike most crypto projects that have yet to show any significant progress in development, Streamr already has key parts of its stack operational. DATA prices are expected to surge once the whole platform goes live.
