DataBrokerDao Use Case: City Monetizes Sensor Data To Recoup Costs Of Landing R&D Firm

mcdform (46)in #blockchain • 7 years ago

A city 30 km south of Brussels has been approached by a helicopter manufacturer that is interested in relocating their R&D department. The company has lots of the normal requests, tax breaks, and bypass of environmental studies.

There's also one out of the norm request, the firm wants the city to purchase and operate a network of IoT sensors in multiple locations around the municipal airport and city. Normally the city would not take on such a venture but thousands of jobs are at stake for its residents.

The Cost of Sensors

The city's research has discovered that the cost to purchase and operate 25 sensors for 5 years is $10,000. The city has also decided that the cost of the sensors is worth it because of the amount of cash the business will infuse.

Although the city agreed to the purchase of the sensors they were not completely satisfied with accepting a $10,000 loss. They began looking for ways to monetize their sensors.

How to Monetize IoT Sensor Data?

All research pointed to new blockchain startup named DataBrokerDao that enables sensor owners to monetize data by selling timed data streams to buyers for cryptocurrency.

The city found that DataBrokerDao will allow the helicopter company to stream data via a private contract on the platform. The helicopter firm agreed to pay any related network costs in DTX tokens, the internal currency of the platform.

As the owner of the sensors, the city also reserved the right to offer the data streams for sale to others. Using the DataBrokerDao platform the city placed the data streams onto the marketplace registry.

Each time a buyer purchases the city's data stream the city is rewarded with DTX tokens that they can hold, sell, or even use to purchase data for their own research.

Who is Buying the Data?

The city's data stream is immensely popular among a number of industries. Surprisingly, weather patterns in this part of Belgium are of extreme interest to brewers of sour beers like Lambics.

These brewers located in other geographic locations have pooled their resources to purchase data streams which they will use create fermentation chambers that mimic the patterns of the famous region.

Local and regional Universities have also begun streaming the data to use for research on climate change in microclimates. Lastly, a relatively new machine learning business is purchasing the data to use with training neural networks for their artificial intelligence software.

How Much is the City Making Back?

According to the projections made by the DataBrokerDao team, the average sensor will make approximately $12 per year. The initial value of the DTX token is pegged to value created by one week worth of data from a single sensor, or ~$0.25.

This may not seem like much money but the sensors will generate $1500 of revenue over their lifetime which effectively lowers the cost of the sensors by 15%. Any city or business would be extremely happy to find a way to cut costs by 15%, especially when using minimal effort.