Spotlight Series: Henri Pihkala — Founder, Streamr

Swash is not alone in its quest for an open, distributed, and fair data economy. Fortunately, by collaborating with a wide web of experts…

Spotlight Series: Henri Pihkala — Founder, Streamr

Swash Spotlight Series: Henri Pihkala — Founder, Streamr

Swash is not alone in its quest for an open, distributed, and fair data economy. Fortunately, by collaborating with a wide web of experts and innovators in the fields of decentralised technology, crypto, and data, we’re getting closer to making that vision reality.

Swash’s partners and advisors include pioneering data advocates and policymakers who leverage their expertise together with the Swash team to fulfil the needs of a distributed data community.

The Spotlight series introduces you to the people behind the movement to give you a better idea of what they’re working on, what excites them, and why Swash. Stay tuned for new releases every week.

Meet Henri Pihkala, the Founder and CEO of Streamr.

This week, Swash meets Henri Pihkala, the founder and CEO of Streamr. In his own words, “Streamr is a crypto project building decentralised infrastructure for data.”

Swash is a close friend of Streamr, one of our all-star backers, given its importance on the launch of the Swash Data Union, which has attracted over 60,000 members at the time of writing.

Henri is the visionary behind Streamr’s innovative data protocol, and Swash interviewed him to learn more about his thoughts on the new age of data, Swash, and the steps needed for crypto to reach mainstream adoption.

Here are some of the highlights from our recent chat with Henri.

Streamr and Swash are working towards similar goals of giving more freedom and agency to individuals while they take back control of their data.

Streamr wants to “enable the transport and sharing of real-time data and other data assets in this sort of global decentralised data fabric.”

As with Swash, Streamr wants to build an infrastructure and ecosystem “that is open and permissionless, and everyone can participate.”

Decentralisation at the core of the new internet.

The mantra of distributed applications giving people the reins over their assets is on par with the new world of crypto-based solutions.

Henri sees the people and organisations in crypto as “a community of people and developers who have come up with their own financial system.”

Henri goes further to point out the achievements of the community:

“They’ve come up with their governance models, their own technology… rewriting the web and rewriting the internet.”

How does Swash fit into this mantra?

Currently, Swash’s Data Union has 60K+ members, where the value of each individual’s data is worth more due to Data Union’s aggregation ability. Swash is “one of the pioneering teams” and is already “the biggest and the first Data Union ever built on the Streamr Data Union’s framework.”

Henri is excited to see what comes next between the integration of Swash and Streamr’s technology, including what “kind of new applications can be built on top of that infrastructure that we’re [Streamr] building.”

Bridging crypto into the masses

Henri believes that Swash is “an entry point into the world of crypto and into the world of decentralised technology.”

Crypto has gained a lot of attention recently, from increased adoption worldwide to the onboarding of financial institutions. However, there’s still a lot of room to merge crypto-native applications into everyday use.

Henri sees Swash as one of the solutions to fill that space:

“There needs to be a bridge that allows tourists from the mainland to come to the crypto island and see what is possible with this new technology, and Swash is one such bridge.”

Watch the full interview here:


About Swash:

Swash is an ecosystem of tools and services that enable people, businesses, and developers to unlock the latent value of data by pooling, securely sharing, and monetising its value.

People share their data to earn while retaining their privacy. Businesses access high-quality, zero-party data in a sustainable and compliant way. Developers set up and build systems within a collaborative development framework with ease.

Swash is reimagining data ownership by enabling all actors of the data economy to earn, access, build and collaborate in a liquid digital ecosystem for data. Stay tuned for the latest updates on the IDO.

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Originally published at https://swashapp.io on September 9, 2021.