Monetizing IoT Data using IOTA
There is a lot of buzz around cryptocurrencies – will BTC be over $20,000 by the time this blog post goes live? – these days, but beyond the hype, one thing is pretty clear: it enables a decentralized economy that is particularly interesting to look at from an IoT perspective.
For the Internet of Things, I believe the role of cryptocurrencies and distributed ledgers is threefold:
- monetization of IoT data – cryptocurrencies make it really easy to implement scenarios where data producers can get a financial compensation in exchange for the value provided by the data they expose. Think of a weather station you would put on your balcony: people or corporations could have access to the feed of sensor data in exchange for some tokens.
- smart contracts – taking monetization a step further, smart contracts can enable higher-order, secured, transactions to automatically take place on the network. If you take the example of the weather station, you could sign a smart contract with a 3rd party whereby you get paid for giving access to your sensor data if and only if you can provide an uptime of at least 99%. Note that this would probably require a trusted third party responsible for checking your uptime and storing it in the ledger.
- security – manufacturers can use a distributed ledger to store information that can be used to help securely bootstrap IoT devices, by e.g allowing customers to check the authenticity of a chip.
In this blog post, we will focus on the first topic: monetizing IoT data.
For that, we will look at leveraging IOTA’s distributed ledger. We will be showing how anyone can be given access to “simple” IoT sensor data on an MQTT broker, while only people who are paying for it will be able to access the live, raw, data stream.
Use case
We will be basing this article on the use case of someone, let’s call her Jane, willing to give access to a live sensor data stream coming from a smart plug, granted that she gets some money (iotas) in return.
The instant power consumption metrics will be published to an MQTT broker twice per second, making for a pretty accurate sampling that people might be interested in buying. On the same MQTT broker, Jane will also be making available the 1-min moving average of the power consumption for anyone to access, even if they don’t necessarily want to pay extra money.
When John, who is maybe a data scientist interested in getting his hands on “real” data wants to get the power consumption from Jane’s smart plug, he has two options:
- access the MQTT broker and subscribe to data published on the ‘public’
sensor/1mtopic, for free, - send some IOTAs to Jane (she’s decided that 500 iotas is what people should pay to access the data for one hour), for his MQTT client to be granted access to
sensor/livetopic where the live, and more valuable to him, data stream is being published.
