Quick Question on the Tokenomics of Sensor Machines w/ PlanetWatch

I was just reading about the Algorand partnership with PlanetWatch – here’s what it says:

“Planetwatch is leveraging Algorand’s speed and scale for the world’s first distributed ledger for air quality sensors on an environmentally-friendly blockchain network.”

Since the ledger runs on the Algorand blockchain, is there an individual transaction fee (in ALGOs) charged every time a sensor records its data onto the ledger?

I’m a bit unclear as to exactly what would qualify as a transaction for fee purposes in the case of sensor data.

(Example – A machine records 5 sensor recordings onto the ledger, the standard ALGO transaction fee is .001 / transaction, so those 5 recordings incur total ALGO transaction fees of .005?)

Yes, I think that your observation is correct. ( see Algorand Transaction )

All the transactions that you would see registered on the algoexplorer have an associated fee with them.

The transaction in the above example is posting some data on the notes field, plus transacting some of the PLANET asset.

Is that answers your question ?

– Thanks for answering. I guess what I don’t understand is: are the actual sensor readings going to be individually written to the Algorand blockchain, or are they going to be somehow wrapped up and consolidated into a “package of readings” where one transaction contains X number of readings?

That’s an interesting implementation question. I don’t know what the underlying implementation is, but note that regardless of the current one, it could get changed in the future.

i.e. If the device had no internet connectivity for 10 hours, it might store internally a small subset of samples and broadcast these later on when internet connectivity is available ( that’s especially true for the on-the-go device ).

Yeah, I’m more trying to figure out what the actual range of intrinsic values for one ALGO coin would be for various types of entities under the current fee structure of .001 ALGO/transaction (IoT devices, banks, markets and exchanges, etc…)