Blockchain network IOTA teams up with Cisco, Volkswagen, others on data marketplace

By Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss

NEW YORK, Nov 28 (Reuters) - IOTA, an open-source blockchainnetwork, has teamed up with some of the biggest global corporatenames led by Cisco Systems Inc, Volkswagen AG, and Samsung Groupto launch what is aimed to be a secure marketplace for data,IOTA co-founder David Sønstebø said on Tuesday.

Blockchain is a digital ledger of transactions thatunderpinned the first crypto-currency bitcoin. It has gainedworldwide prominence due to its perceived usefulness inrecording and keeping track of assets across all industries.

"The data marketplace is a completely separate project thatsimply utilizes the underlying IOTA protocol," said Sønstebø inemailed responses to Reuters.

IOTA is headquartered in Berlin.

China's Huawei group, a multinational networking andtelecommunications company, is also part of the data marketplaceproject, IOTA said.

The project aims to create a market for data that companiescan buy and sell.

IOTA said more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data aregenerated daily and are increasing exponentially on a monthlybasis. However, more than 99 percent of this data is wasted andlost to the void because there is currently no ability forowners to sell or share this data in a secure fashion.

"Any kind of data can be monetized," Sønstebø said. "If youhave a weather station collecting wind, temperature, humidity,and barometric data, for instance, you can sell that to anentity that is doing climatic research."

As soon as data is put onto IOTA's decentralized ledger, itis distributed to countless nodes or the computers that connectto the blockchain network, ensuring that it is impossible totamper with the data, Sønstebø said.

Each of IOTA's partners on the marketplace project willprovide data within their sector.

"The goal is to enable a very diverse and open datamarketplace...which incentivizes a free flow of data betweenentities," Sønstebø said.

The IOTA network has been live since 2016, the IOTAco-founder said, in an earlier interview with Reuters.

It did a crowdfunding event in 2015, so that people couldsupport the project, raising more than 1,300 bitcoins, he said.

"IOTA is kind of the first distributed ledger that goesbeyond the blockchain," Sønstebø said.

"We got rid of the blocks and we got rid of the chains,which has resulted in getting rid of the major pain points orlimitations of the blockchain such as fees, scalability, andcentralization."(Reporting by Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss; Editing by FrancesKerry)