IOTA is a distributed ledger (blockchain) system with no transaction fees. If that’s not enough to get you excited, how about this: they’ve just launched a pilot version of a data marketplace that will let owners sell data streams, mostly from Internet of Things devices. Whoa Nelly, eh? In theory, people could sell personal data streams too. The “no transaction fee” part of IOTA makes it all possible, since otherwise the transaction fees would make micropayments for data impractical.

All that growth doesn’t mean marketers are doing a great job managing their money. A study from ID Comms found that just 15% of advertisers say they’re using media technology effectively, even though 75% agree they need a clear adtech strategy. Good news for some of us: specialist tech consultants are the most trusted adtech advisors.

Treasure Data will provide its system to free for companies that are stuck in contracts with other CDPs. The trade-up program is available to companies with roughly firms with $1 billion or more revenue, that already have a competitive CDP in place. There will still be some costs for services to make the conversion but Treasure Data says these are fairly small since it has considerable experience with such projects.