DataBroker DAO: Dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s
By: Frank Van Geertruyden
Tags: Blockchain, UI, Erc20, Internet of Things, Online Marketplace

Autumn has officially started; it was raining cats and dogs this morning at our headquarters in Leuven, Belgium. And with the end of Summer, the DataBroker DAO platform is nearing completion. Just two more weeks, and everybody will be able to start trading sensor data.

In the meantime, we would like to share some detailed information with you and give you a sneak preview of the upcoming marketplace. Here’s what we’ve been doing the past couple of weeks …

1. UI refactor

There were a lot of changes on the DataBroker DAO front-end:

- clearing stream types yields no streams -> before it yielded all streams;

- the datasets page now shows a paginated table with indicators per dataset, whether you are the owner or not and whether you’ve already purchased it or not;

- the purchases page now shows both streams and datasets in separate tabbed, paginated data tables;

- the listings page now shows both streams and datasets in separate tabbed, paginated data tables;

- it is now possible to enlist datasets, which before wasn’t the case;

- the stream/dataset details page now shows a challenges table (including the reason), as opposed to simply the amount challenged like we had before;

- the most prominent and most important change is that every interaction with the front-end that triggers blockchain actions is now visualized through a modal that takes you through every single transaction and outlines the underlying process on the blockchain.

Check out our ‘Purchase flow demo of IoT sensor data stream (or data set)’:a sneak preview of our new generic transaction modals. This video depicts the Sensor Purchase flow, showing which underlying transactions are sent to — and mined in the blockchain.

2. ERC20 Bridge

Up until now, you could ‘fund’ some DTX tokens into your DataBroker DAO wallet. Obviously, this is not how production is going to end up working. Seeing that we have a DTX token on the mainnet, but would like to retain all the benefits of running the platform on a private PoA network, we developed an ERC20 token bridge which was inspired by https://github.com/paritytech/parity-bridge/.

Basically, what it does, is allow you to transfer your mainnet DTX onto a token bridge. Using a system of trusted validators to grant you access to ‘move’ them to the other side. When permission is granted, the same amount of DTX tokens is minted on our private network. The same goes for withdrawing tokens.

It is in this step that we’ve hit a little snag. Seeing that the bridge deals with actual mainnet ethers, we feel it is of the utmost importance that we release a bridge that is fully unit tested, functional and solid.

3. Backend refactor

This is actually the biggest and the ‘baddest’ change made to the platform. Where before it ran on Mint 1.0, we have now successfully upgraded to Mint 2.0, which is a total game changer to take DBDAO to enterprise level maturity. We have completely rewritten our codebase to move to a fully decentralized, containerized, asynchronous architecture, capable of handling thousands of requests per second. Built on top of Ethers.io, RabbitMQ and MongoDB.

It is actually pretty hard to describe the awesomeness without going into great detail. Therefore, we will be giving you a deeper insight into the architecture in a follow-up development post next week.

Another short demo we shared on our YouTube channel is about Minting DTX tokens- blockchain transaction modal:

To be able to interact with the DataBroker DAO platform and start selling and buying data, you need DTX tokens. In the live version, Minting won’t be possible anymore and will be replaced by the ERC 20 token bridge mechanism.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, our new and improved DataBroker DAO website went live this week. Check it out at https://databrokerdao.com. Should you still see the old version of the website, you will have to clear the cache of your internet browser. How you do this, is explained here.

Join our Telegram channel for all information and questions or drop us a line: hello@databrokerdao.com