SIP-24: Fund Streamr Beta with 100M DATA

Authors: Henri Pihkala, Mark Little

Background

The token holders control a reserve of tokens called the Unminted Reserve, with a balance of around 700 million DATA at the time of writing. The Unminted Reserve is the quantity of tokens between the tokens in circulation and the hard cap of 2 billion DATA.

The Unminted Reserve is an integral part of Streamr tokenomics. Its purpose is to drive go-to-market and adoption:

• Provide funding for project go-to-market until sustainability is reached
• Provide rewards for Operator nodes until replaced by organic value flows
• Other purposes as decided by the token holders

Based on community feedback, it has become a high priority goal for the project to replace the use of the Unminted Reserve by building a revenue-generating business. While this will obviously take some time and requires investment in the short term (which is what this proposal is about), this strategy will eventually halt any spending of the Unminted Reserve and can even turn the token supply deflationary. With the new mainstream video streaming and conferencing product, new go-to-market strategy, and new team energy, this seems achievable.

The use of tokens from the Unminted Reserve is subject to a governance vote such as this one. These regular events are called Governance Checkpoints and they release tokens in batches. The Checkpoints are an opportunity for DATA holders to review progress and achievements since the previous token batch was unlocked, as well as weigh in on how the tokens should be spent. Unlocked tokens then slowly and gently flow to the open markets over a long time period to provide funding for project development and growth without affecting token price.

So far, 200M tokens have been granted and deployed during the years 2023-2025. Tokens created in this way currently account for roughly 15% of the circulating supply or 10% of the maximum supply. The below chart from CoinMarketCap shows how the overall token supply has developed since 2017, with colors and labels displaying the different token allocations. The tokens deployed via previous Governance Checkpoints are shown in light blue (“DAO” in the legend):

Overall, as seen from the above chart, token spending has so far been rather responsible, and the project’s burn rate has been successfully adjusted based on prevailing market conditions and token value at any given time. The previous Governance Checkpoint was in October 2024, and thanks to the controlled spending, the 100M tokens granted then have lasted until now despite the heavy market downturns.

Token holders should take this opportunity to review previous achievements, current strategy and plans, and decide whether an investment into the next step on our journey towards a mainstream application and sustainable revenue makes sense. A rejection of the proposal would imply that a different direction is preferred by the token holders.

Achievements Since Previous Checkpoint

The previous batch of funding tokens, deployed since October 2024, have enabled the following main achievements:

Pivot to Application Layer

Having developed the Streamr Network to the Streamr 1.0 milestone, and therefore completing the original protocol roadmap, the project’s focus has been shifted from infrastructure to building a mainstream application for live video and audio streaming - on top of the strong, underlying protocol of course.

The new direction enables the project to deliver real-world value to ordinary people (as opposed to seeking protocol adoption among Web3 devs), enabling potentially many more people to use Streamr technology and come in contact with the DATA token, as well as enabling new kinds of revenue streams which were not easily available when only offering the protocol infrastructure to builders.

The new consumer-facing product, Streamr (formerly referred to as StreamrTV), is still at an early stage, but already supports decentralized, scalable, end-to-end encrypted live video and audio streaming in a one-to-many pattern. It also features recording, screen sharing, text chat, and a fiat payment rail for supporting the broadcaster by purchasing Super Balloons during the broadcast - the first monetization hook for both the project and content creators.

Autostaker & Connecting the Streamr Application to Network Tokenomics

Developed a plugin for the Streamr Node to automate staking decisions for node operators, reducing manual workload, lowering barriers to participation, and making sponsorship participation more efficient and gas-efficient. The autostaker also enables node operators to catch sponsorships with shorter lifespans, such as those created to support video streams on the Streamr application.

In fact, a proof-of-concept integration between the Streamr application and the Streamr Network tokenomics and operators was established, able to automatically deploy sponsorships and DATA tokens to support and secure content on the Streamr application, paving the way for more and more of the node rewards being earned for operator nodes providing actual real-world benefit.

Flexible and Secure Cryptography

On the protocol level, a cryptographic identity abstraction was created, making it easy to support almost any cryptographic signing or encryption algorithm. Using the new framework, support was added for ECDSA on the secp256r1 curve to enable StreamrTV to use the fast, native crypto libraries included in browsers. Support was also added for the novel, quantum resistant signature scheme ML-DSA, as well as ML-KEM for key exchange, enabling quantum secure communications over the Streamr Network.

Proof of Performance via Scalability Tests

The project ran large-scale tests to measure latency and scalability of the Streamr 1.0 Network, especially battle testing locality-aware routing. Tests confirmed that the protocol performs reliably across thousands of nodes in 17 global regions, validating the new “trackerless” network architecture.

Organizational Maturation & Governance Improvements

The Project Council was formed to remove single points of failure and eliminate leadership bottlenecks. Day-to-day leadership was restructured under newly carved out CEO and CTO roles, aligning with the application-first strategic direction, and providing checks & balances and a cleaner separation of concerns among the Council and the project’s operational leadership.

More details about the project’s activities and achievements can be found in the quarterly transparency reports:

• Q4/2024
• Q1/2025
• Q2/2025
• Q3/2025

Proposal

This proposal suggests that the next batch of 100M DATA is allocated from the Unminted Reserve towards product development and market entry as described in Mark’s recent blog post. In a nutshell, it positions the product as the “Signal of video”, a video streaming and conferencing solution for security and privacy oriented people.

The current balance of the Unminted Reserve is 700M DATA. The proposed allocation leaves plenty of headroom and runway for future allocations if needed.

Goals

With these tokens, we set out to reach the following milestones:

Product Delivery Milestones

• Extend product use cases to include various forms of many-to-many video. At this milestone, the product can be used for private conferencing (Google Meet-style), speakers-to-audience (X Spaces-style), as well as host-to-audience (Twitch-style).
• Enable IP protection as an additional privacy feature. This works by connecting to the network via Operator nodes, essentially creating a decentralized VPN specifically for using the Streamr App.
• Unlock a revenue stream by introducing a paid plan alongside free usage:
  • Free tier focussed on adoption and basic usage.
  • Paid tier (Pro) connects to Streamr Network tokenomics to enable IP protection, more reliable connectivity, and heightened privacy and security via the participation of Operator nodes.

Commercial Milestones

• Achieve the very first paid users and start receiving the first revenue from the app. At the milestone this is expected to still be small but nonzero.
• Establish a known CAC for a Pro subscriber, based on real or test acquisition channels.
• Deliver a dummy P&L / unit economics model showing how the business could work at scale. This work will be used to support future capital raise (see below).
• Deliver a funding plan for external, non-deflationary capital, including options such as: VC funding, a new token, crowdfunding or other community-aligned mechanisms. Objective: move away from further DATA emissions by the end of 2026.

Strategic Milestones

• Connect the DATA token to the Streamr app Pro subscriptions to demonstrate how product revenue converts to token demand and tokenomics. From there, deliver a plan on how to further integrate the product with DATA tokenomics, including any adjustments of the tokenomics if necessary.
• Bring down the project burn rate to sub-$100k per month by mid-Q1 to reduce token selling pressure and make it easier to achieve revenue-based sustainability.
• Council runs a formal review and recommendation about open sourcing the Streamr App, with input from the community sub-committee. The final decision must be made via a SIP.

Runway to Next Checkpoint

The projected runway is determined by the burn rate and the average token price over a future time period, the latter of which cannot be known in advance. To mitigate that uncertainty, we adjust the burn rate depending on market conditions.

In the latest transparency report (Q3/2025), the project’s burn rate was approximately $160k/month. The project is aggressively targeting a sub-$100k/month burn rate from mid-Q1, and plans to achieve this by:

• Having a lean core team
• Flexibly hiring external talent as needed from time to time
• Optimizing organizational overheads
• Seeking efficiency gains from AI

The burn rate we can control, while the DATA price we can’t. Due to the latest crash(es) in the crypto markets, the price of DATA has been hovering around the $0.007 mark. In light of the project’s history and compared to the token’s past market valuations, it’s safe to say we’re at a rather low point, comparatively speaking. The current price level is actually not that far from the all-time low of $0.004854 seen on March 13th, 2020.

The previous funding packages awarded via Governance Checkpoints have lasted more than a year each. Due to the current market conditions, there’s a risk that this package won’t last quite as long. However, controlling the burn rate can extend the runway and keep token spending reasonable, while the crypto markets could well recover and further extend the runway. Here are a few scenarios to consider:

• “Lean” scenario: The token price remains at $0.005-$0.007 and the project achieves $80k burn rate. The tokens will last 6-10 months.
• “Improving” scenario: The token price returns to $0.015 (as seen for most of 2025) and the project burn rate is $100k. The tokens will last 12-15 months.
• “Success” scenario: The token price returns to 2024 levels of around $0.05 and the project burn rate adjusts up to $180k to fuel growth. The tokens will last 2-3 years, during which project sustainability through revenue is most likely achieved. This means that further token funding from the reserve will not be needed.

The above scenarios do not factor in any incoming revenue from the application. Obviously, any income will directly and immediately alleviate the need to spend an equivalent value in tokens, extending the lifespan of the token package.

The Goals section assumes the most conservative scenario, “Lean”. If one of the better scenarios is realized, the project can deliver more than what is stated in the Goals section with this token package.

Restrictions to Selling

The tokens are sold little by little over time, applying these rules:

• Selling occurs only by adding liquidity, never by taking liquidity. The daily quota is split up into multiple orders which are placed into the sell-side order book to wait for a buyer that matches it.
• There is a selling cap per day which corresponds to the burn rate. This will be calculated from monthly_burn_rate/30. For example, if the estimated monthly burn rate is $100k, the selling cap will be $3333/day. If the quota is not sold on a given day, it rolls over to the next day to prevent running out of funding in a given month.

Transparency Commitment

The project continues to publish quarterly transparency reports, which detail achievements, expenses, funding, and adoption metrics. The reports will contain revenue (paid subscription) metrics once available.

Closing Words

As Mark outlines in his strategy blog, this is a time of opportunity, excitement and delivery for the project. While the Streamr Network was a quite technical endeavor that only appealed to a select crowd of like-minded Web3 builders, we now have a product that has a solid value proposition to mainstream Web3 and Web2 users. That value proposition builds around privacy, security, resilience, scalability, freedom of speech, and cost-effectiveness in live video.

Ultimately, we have a firm belief that our core technology allows us to build a better video streaming product than the current solutions, one that is fit for purpose in 2026 and beyond.

This new direction also perfectly leverages all the heavy lifting done on the protocol level since 2017, allowing the Streamr live video application to build on the Streamr Network, which our CTO Petri (quite modestly) called “the most advanced peer-to-peer network in the world”.