Amazon Patent
It has been recently announced that a subsidiary of Amazon, received a patent for cryptocurrency streaming data marketplace. They explain that the company have noticed a possible gap in the market, as with the development of the technology, as well as wider adaptation of cryptocurrencies, there is an increased need for organizations and people dealing with cryptocurrencies to have access to and stream large amounts of data with low latency. The company says they want to allow to “build real-time dashboards, capture exceptions and generate alerts, drive recommendations, and make other real-time business or operational decisions”.
This multi-streaming data service could process information from numerous different sources like “web site click-streams, marketing and financial information, manufacturing instrumentation and social media, operational logs, metering data and so forth”.
The patent states:
“For example, a group of electronic or internet retailers who accept bitcoin transactions may have a shipping address that may correlate with the bitcoin address. The electronic retailers may combine the shipping address with the bitcoin transaction data to create correlated data and republish the combined data as a combined data stream.”
The company knows that such data on its own may not be that interesting, however by combining data with information from additional sources it may become essential in future operations.
“For example, a law enforcement agency may be a customer and may desire to receive global bitcoin transactions, correlated by country, with ISP data to determine source IP addresses and shipping addresses that correlate to bitcoin addresses,” Amazon gave as an example and explained it further. “The agency may not want additional available enhancements such as local bank data records. The streaming data marketplace may price this desired data out per GB (gigabyte), for example, and the agency can start running analytics on the desired data using the analysis module.”
The sole idea for data marketplace is not in fact that new or revolutionary, as it has been suggested and attempted by various smaller projects. We’ve seen couple of ICOs trying to achieve such decentralized marketplace for data, however on a much smaller scale. A giant like Amazon could undoubtedly wipe any startup competition and succeed in delivering this service to a whole world.