Streamr, an open-source, crowdfunded, decentralised platform for real-time data has released its latest version of the Streamr Network, which transports streams of messages from data publishers to subscribers, appearing to the user as a global publish/subscribe messaging service.
“This is a real leap forward for trustless messaging,” stated Henri Pihkala, Streamr’s co-founder. “Decentralized projects, large and small, looking to integrate real-time functionality into their user offering finally have a workable solution.”
“Obviously this milestone is not the end of the road,” he adds. “Most notably, the token economics are not yet included. They will be introduced during the next two milestones. But we’re currently ahead of schedule and we hope developers will start experimenting, reaching out and building on top of the solution we’ve released today.”
It is similar in functionality to message queues, enterprise messaging systems, MQTT brokers, Apache Kafka, or pub/sub cloud messaging services. However, centralized message brokers have inherent scaling and economic incentive problems. The Streamr Network solves the scaling issue with distributed message brokering over a custom peer-to-peer network architecture while supporting MQTT.
In later milestones, cryptocurrency, cryptographic proofs, and game theory will be used to incentivise people and organisations to run network nodes known as Brokers. Broker nodes contribute bandwidth and storage to the network and earn DATA paid as usage fees by users of the Network. In a sense, running a Broker node is somewhat comparable to mining; nodes provide network resources which, using the Streamr protocol, collectively produce the message transport service available to applications.
Together, the P2P structure and incentive mechanism enable decentralization, which means that the network can operate without any central party controlling the data or generating value out of it. This will finally allow real-time dApps (decentralized Apps) and DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) to be hosted in a fully decentralized fashion.
So far, decentralized applications have not been able to make use of the existing capabilities of tools such as Apache Kafka, since they must be hosted centralized servers. A DAO doesn’t have a business address and true dApps do not have company credit cards. With Streamr’s Network, such applications can finally find a solution that permits decentralization and crypto payments in order to utilise Web3 native trustless realtime messaging.
Users can interact with Streamr today using the Core user interface, SDKs, or directly via the API. Official or community-built SDKs are available for JS, Java and Python, with more in the works. Streamr expects to open the network to public untrusted nodes in the next milestone stage, scheduled for 2020. Until then, Streamr invites verified individuals and organisations to join in the running of this.
Streamr DATAcoin (DATA) is the Ethereum ERC-20 token representing value in the Streamr ecosystem. The companion blockchain is used for value settlement, identity, and permission control, while the data itself stays in the scalable Streamr Network.
Developers who would like to learn more can join an upcoming webinar taking place later in October. Further details will be announced soon on Twitter, Reddit and Telegram.
Streamr is being built by contributors from around the world. Crowdfunded with $30M in October 2017, it is an open-source project aimed primarily at developers, with the real-time data Network at its core, plus a Marketplace and Core application to make manipulating and monetizing data possible with a few clicks. Functional versions of each component exist today, with full decentralization being the project’s goal over the next few years. The project was started by real-time data veterans with backgrounds in algorithmic trading and finance markets. To learn more, visit www.streamr.com. You can follow Streamr on Twitter, Reddit and Telegram.
