ABSTRACT

These last months have been very exciting because of the confirmation of the market demand for data monetization. Yet, at the same time, we didn’t have to resources to showcase these steps forward to our supporters. By Q4 2019 we plan to bring 18 months of commercial efforts and a completely new platform into production.

WORDS FROM THE CEO

Before getting to the updates, I would like to thank everyone in our community for supporting the DataBroker DAO  project, sharing your ideas and recommendations openly.

The evolutions of the DTX exchange listings over the past several weeks and the request to have transparency about our achievements and platform roadmap made us realize that we have to work more closely and transparently with our community.

I take responsibility for letting this communication gap form and for not acting sooner to address our community’s expectations. Over the last 18 months, we have heavily invested in the development of the DataBroker DAO platform, hired supplementary resources and prepared the platform for commercialization. We have been driving business growth, increasing the number of members in our alliance and measuring the positive market traction. I’m very proud of the team’s achievements. Our top priority – which we determined from the start – , is to realize the value of DataBroker DAO by accelerating the adoption by data buyers and data sellers in the market. Through this communication update, I want to address the community’s concerns and confirm that we are going to production with the DataBroker DAO platform in Q4 2019 and have a planned approach for formulating an effective communication strategy for the community going onwards and upwards.
Matthew van Niekerk, CEO

DTX EXCHANGE LISTING

Back in 2018, we applied to list the DTX token on 15 exchanges, including several top 10 exchanges. We succeeded in listing the DTX token on CoinFalcon, Tokenjar and Probit. The online application process to list on some of the other exchanges are unfortunately very ineffective. Most of the times, we don’t even get no response at all from the platform’s owners. Recently, CoinFalcon delisted the DTX token as part of their general removal of altcoins. Despite having a contractual relationship with their clients, CoinFalcon made this decision with zero communication or notification.

Our lessons learned

From the past, we learned that DataBroker DAO and its community have to work hand in hand and that we have to convince the top 10 exchanges to list the DTX token. Exchanges listing the DTX token without communication and/or formal agreement with DataBroker DAO are a risk for the long term stability of the token.
We need to follow the quality and reputation of exchanges listing DTX closely.

What is our immediate priority?

We are reaching out in our network to establish relationships with decision makers at reputable exchanges. This will take some time but hopefully it will get us past the lack of responses from online application processes.

Bit4You, the first and only fully regulated Belgian exchange with fiat on and off ramp, has been selected as a trustable and qualitative exchange who will list the DTX token within a few weeks. We do not expect immediate liquidity for the community but it will bring trust to our clients. Secondly, we are analyzing the exchanges proposed by the community and will evaluate the most relevant, qualitative and trustable ones to list DTX. See below for the current status of the applications

Current Exchange Application Status

Upcoming

• Bit4you – expected listing in July

Ongoing

• Yobit – application and fee sent, awaiting approval (estimated 1 week)
• Idex – call scheduled this week
• Probit – to keep being listed, need to invest in market making, contract negotiations in progress

Application in progress:

• Bittrex – re-application in progress, they require a lot of new documents and verifications.

No response yet:

• Beaxy – expect answer beginning of July
• io – submitted before, no response, resubmitted now
• Gate.io – submitted before, no response, resubmitted now
• Bitmax – submitted all information, awaiting a response
• Upbit – submitted all information, awaiting a response

No listing :

• Kucoin – listing fee is unaffordable
• Livecoin – listing fee too expensive for the size of exchange

Support request to our community

We kindly request our community to support us in the listing process by getting us in touch directly with the right contacts at these exchanges, as for example Huobi for which any support would be greatly appreciated.

ACHIEVEMENTS 2018

We delivered the first stable version of the DataBroker DAO platform and integrated the support of DTX tokens. This version allowed us to test the market interest during multiple worldwide events that allowed us to promote the DataBroker DAO brand.

Platform

The dAPI and smart contracts have been totally re-engineered from the ground up with no visual impact for the platform visitors. In March, we published the platform V2,0 Alpha 1 “Discovery Release” with support of a token curated registry with DTX token staking to ensure the quality of data being sold and purchased. We have implemented a brand new dApp focusing on the discovery of interesting data sets, allowing potential buyers to search easily and find the data they need. The platform V2,0 Alpha 2 “Purchase Release” was focussing on improving the frontend interface, adding the possibility to search data on maps (f.e. 30,000 sensors from Luftdaten) and purchasing sensor data with DTX tokens.

Visibility

We participated in global events to promote the DataBroker DAO brand and really were blown away by the market interest. Articles were published in Techbullion, Jinse.com, Steemit, Crypto Rich and we saw very positive reviews from Cryptoworld, Coinidol, Onyeri, Artyom, Rel Crypto … We published articles for the use of DataBroker DAO for Smart Cities, Agriculture, Smart Locations.

We organized roadshows in multiple countries and got top honors presenting DataBroker DAO in San Francisco, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Luxembourg, Cayman Islands, New York, Belgium, Germany, Hong Kong, Sydney …

 Alliance

Early 2018 we launched the DataBroker DAO Alliance which consists of these 4 types of stakeholders: sensor owners, data buyers, gateway operators and data processors. Starting with 7 members including Yutix, (agriculture and environmental data), Technilog and IdentityMind, we evolved quickly to +20 members, including global gateway operators like Ericsson, Siemens, Panasonic, Sigfox and Actility.

    ROADMAP 2019

Value proposition and business model

The DataBroker DAO business model has been thoroughly reviewed in Q2 2019, bringing more value to our clients and opening additional market opportunities to our project:

• White labeling: next to our own brand, major data sellers will be able to adopt our platform, using their own branding. All platforms will be interoperable and will use DTX tokens for sales;
• Data Exchange Controller Platform (DXP): we have extended the platform with a new feature, allowing companies to safely share data between multiple parties. We measured high market traction for it in healthcare, connected cars, and smart cities sectors.

Platform evolution and commercial release roadmap

In Q2 2019 we adapted the marketing website to generate data buyers and data sellers leads (“Lead Generation”), which are being handled by our Sales Team (“matchmakers”). Currently, we’re capturing one potential data buyer and one data provider per day through the platform.

Q2 2019 – “Lead Generation”

The V3.0 “Pre-Release” scheduled for Q4 2019 will be the first commercial version where data buyers and data sellers will be able to meet each other autonomously. Over the lasts weeks we dedicated our efforts to intensive workshops to create an ideal costumer journey and disruptive user experience, using the platform. The new defined UX wireframes will replace the current DataBroker DAO website and bring new functionalities:

• Search Data for searching data based on data sources, data tags and data providers
• Communities, displaying the list of available data sources and data providers per community theme (f.e. environment, geographics …)
• Data Use Cases, inspirational and informational articles explaining the benefit of using data (f.e. crop monitoring to optimize cultivation, data sharing for smart cities, tree monitoring to support climate adaption and mitigation …)
• Data Providers Adverts allowing data sellers to promote the type of data they offer for sale
• User Dashboard with reach features like Follow, Matches, Deals, Notifications, Messages and Account management

Q4 2019 – V3.0 “Pre-Release”

Data Sellers onboarding

From July till September 2019, we will onboard 3 data sellers that will participate to a V3.0 pilot phase before going to production:

• Data seller 1: Geolocalized data provider (Belgium)
• Data seller 2: IoT Platform (France)
• Data seller 3:  Global environmental data provider

COMMERCIAL TRACTION

Regarding DataBroker DAO’s commercial traction, we have more than 300 opportunities in our CRM system and are actively working on more than 50 of them simultaneously. About 15 of these clients are currently at the proposal stage and we are negotiating MoU’s and contracts with several of these clients. For some of these, we have drafted and proposed joint press releases but please understand that we will not communicate until this is agreed.

• Opportunity 1: global car manufacturer for monetization of connected car data
• Opportunity 2: white labeled data marketplace for a telecom operator in the Middle East
• Opportunity 3: white labeled data marketplace for a Smart City in Europe
• Opportunity 4: 5G Life campus / development of a data sharing and monetization solution for Smart Buildings with Ericsson / Securitas / Signify / Degetel

Whether these are covered by NDA or not, we are not willing to communicate prematurely on these opportunities, for different reasons:

1. We want to avoid creating false expectations for the community,
2. the partner organizations are mostly large international players in either manufacturing or telecommunications, which often do not want to communicate their intentions with DataBroker DAO for competitive reasons.

TEAM UPDATE

In 2018, our team grew with Thomas, Silke and Peter-Jan. Currently, our team consists of 12 people, welcoming Adrien (developer) and Vincent (DataBroker DAO product owner).

We will onboard 3 supplementary members in July 2019 to accelerate our go to market and commercialization of DataBroker DAO.

“ My main objective is to get the platform to the next level. From the past I worked on multiple large IoT projects. The data marketplace story is not new to me as I’ve been in contact with worldwide organizations searching for exactly the same solution. Early this year I’ve met Matthew and Roderik and I was amazed by the job they have done so far so I decided to join the team and the community. ” – Vincent Bultot (Client Solutions Manager)

“ I’m a software engineer passionate about current web technologies. I joined SettleMint because I wanted to work daily with blockchain technology. I want to be part of the revolution that will make a decentralized, secure and transparent internet part of everyday life. ”
Adrien Blavier (Blockchain Developer)

We also hired a new community manager that will help us to bring more transparency to our development and opportunities towards our community.

“As a one of the earliest supporters of Databroker DAO, I have been following this project very closely since the beginning, staying in contact with the team and being active in the community. Knowing about all the business work the team has done so far, I’m willing to transparently communicate about the worldwide potential of this platform and satisfy our community by pushing Databroker DAO to the next level ” – Afro (Arnel Dulbic)

PATH FORWARD

We are eager to work together with our community in a constructive and efficient way with respect to the confidentiality agreements we have with our clients.

DataBroker DAO is on track. During the last months, we have reviewed our business plan, generated multiple opportunities in various segments which confirms the market traction and our unique market position.

We are very excited on the platform v3.0 launch in Q4 2019, providing a fully new and disruptive user experience with many functionalities we were missing to push full commercialization of DataBroker DAO and help organizations to monetize their data thanks to the DTX token.