Hey folks, in today’s article I’m going to do a deep dive on the project known as Streamr and their native token $DATA who just recently launched on mainnet, a feat which explains why they’ve seen some great price action as of late:
There’s been quite a bit of different DePIN projects that have been launching, yet with Streamr their road to mainnet has been nearly 5 years in the making, and as such they’ve already been able to start off with more than a 1000 nodes with millions of dollars in revenue (or what they call “sponsored” $DATA). But before we get into it, a quick refresher on #DePIN…
#DePIN, or Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network, is currently one of the top-trending crypto narratives that fuses web3 and cryptographic technology into a serviceable product. Perhaps the most popular DePIN project from last cycle was Helium miners, which was a crowd-sourced network where people could mine $HNT if they setup personal network hotspots. As different projects are learning more and more about the importance of having decentralized systems, Streamr is one of the latest to offer a decentralized system for data streaming.
In a nutshell, Streamr can be described of as “Bittorrent but for real-time data streams.” If you’ve ever used any torrent downloading site before, you’ll probably be familiar with how fast one can download gigabytes of data in minutes (if not seconds), especially if there’s a lot of other peers supplying a part of the requested data. In a similar fashion, Streamr aims to accomplish the same peer-to-peer network model to utilization of people’s bandwidth for data streaming for any type of transmittable data — not just for a bootlegged episode of Game of Thrones.
By being fully peer-to-peer, Streamr removes the need to have centralized server, thus opening up the possibility to allow a limitless number of people supplying real time data streams so that data can be transmitted in almost real-time — all in a permissionless system without a single point of failure.
Once someone accesses part of a data file, say a video stream, that portion of the video can now be relayed to others who are requesting the same video. Assuming that you have a lot of nodes, since the video is partitioned the actual fixed amount of data to be held on each node is minimal, yet still on the frontend providing the user with a full data stream.
One of the main indicators for Streamr’s success will most likely lie with it’s ability to become decentralized — a feat that requires many, many nodes. With Streamr, users can opt to run their own “Operator nodes,” that that are incentivized to provide stability and security of the data streams, and according to its Dune dashboard, there’s already more than 1100 of them.
From my understanding, Operators are similar to the Validators on Cosmos chains. And similar to Validators, regular retail users can choose to delegate and stake their $DATA to their Operator of choice in order to earn a share of the interest that the Operator earns for helping secure the network.
As you can see from the graphic above, apart from the node operators and delegators, there’s also a third role known as “Sponsorship,” or otherwise known as Sponsors. From what I’ve gathered Sponsors are simply customers who wish to pay Streamr (or technically the Streamr Nodes) for a specific data stream via smart contract, where the smart contract itself is called a Sponsorship. In other words, if I wanted to make sure I got a live and secure stream for the Superbowl, then I could pay for a Sponsorship smart contract that would pay out to different Streamr nodes that help secure and facilitate the Superbowl stream.
How much adoption can Streamr get? It’s perhaps too soon to tell about what’s in store for Streamr’s future, but currently at the time of writing, already there are reportedly 37 different Sponsorships with 4,680 different streams created:
Streamer has been publicly in the works with different partners, most notably with DIMO (an IoT platform that allows drivers to provide and monetize their driving and vehicle data) and IoTex (a service that provides on-chain verification with Zero-Knowledge proofs), which together comprise of 211 different operators at time of writing:
Apart from DIMO, there are currently 36 different projects listed on Streamr’s website that really show the wide spectrum of different applications that can utilize data streams — everything from the International Space Station to trams in Helsinki:
In a nutshell, the $DATA token is built to be the native currency for all actions performed across the Streamr network. Projects like DIMO must obtain $DATA in order to pay out its Operators, which at time of writing is currently more than 100k $DATA per day:
Differing much from Cosmos and Ethereum economic models, staking rewards are not paid out by inflationary mechanisms, but instead from the sponsors themselves. However just like with staked Ethereum, the Operators and its delegators are all staking their own $DATA in order to help provide the requested data stream, with rewards for providing data as requested and punished (or slashed) if they are not. With the passing of SIP-15, the protocol also enacts a 5% flat fee which is collected when any value is transferred from sponsors to operators/delegators.
Token Supply — $DATA currently has a circulating supply of roughly more than 1 billion tokens, with a reported maximum supply of 2 billion tokens:
Originally conceived with a 1 billion token supply, the supply was voted to double in coincidence with its migration to Polygon. Additionally through a unanimously approved proposal SIP-14, as of this year the new token inflation has increased from 2% to 3%, which equates to 30 million of new $DATA released every year. With a roughly $0.80 cent token price, this equates to about a $800 million dollar total market cap with $1.6 billion in FDV.
Does Streamr have what it takes to really thrive in a space where so many DePIN projects are launching? Some of the initial statistics look promising, but given how it’s just launched mainnet this month, it’s definitely still too early to tell. Their partnership with DIMO for instance, is one that has been years in the making, so it’s not yet clear about how much more revenue and adoption they’ll be able to get or how quickly adoption might occur. If we take a similar look at other DePIN network such as Akash who does DePIN for computing, they went “mainnet 2” in March of 2021 but still didn’t see the run-up in adoption until more than a year later:
Speaking of machine learning, so far the biggest actual use cases for Streamr are location/time data, but what it may not have tapped into yet potentially is the world of AI — a field that incidentally needs a lot of data. If the AI trend stays as hot as it has been, there’s another big upside of Streamr to gain more sponsorships who need more streams for AI applications.
Are you staking your $DATA? Or are you an operator yourself? If so, I’d be interested in hearing about your experiences in the comment section below.
And as always, thanks for taking the time to read this and be sure to follow me on twitter (https://twitter.com/CryptosWith) to get all my latest updates. Also, looking for a gift for your Crypto-loving/hating friend? Give them a REKT journal to cheer them up!
Disclaimer: And as a final reminder, this is not financial advice and this is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please as always, do your own research and find what investments are best for you. Cheers everyone!
