October 2014
Startup Tracker launched at TechCrunch Disrupt London—wins Evernote Prize.
The venture that would eventually lead to the inception of the DX Network started as a browser extension to access CrunchBase information while browsing. In its simplest form, Startup Tracker already attracted attention in the Tech community, from
Product Hunt, all the way up to
the BBC.
Startup Tracker's first year was dedicated to iterating over the product with early-users which ranged from solo founders to investors through innovation departments at multinational companies. It was during this key year that the business landscape, challenges and opportunities surrounding the Tech Industry’s data were uncovered.
November 2015
Startup Tracker 2.0 released adding new data sources and crowdsourcing.
The next major version of Startup Tracker broadened the amount of data available through the browser extension by integrating public APIs, forming partnerships with niche startup platforms, public resource crawling and integrating on-demand crowdsourcing in the product.
Top tier organizations including Thomson Reuters, TechStars, ACM, Gartner, Allianz, Accel Partners, Stanford University, Ogilvy and Amazon started using Startup Tracker as product development continued.
April 2017
Dawn of the DX Network: Startup Tracker selected by Y Combinator for Startup School class of 2017.
Startup Tracker was accepted into the Y Combinator Startup School out of 13,321 applicants which resulted in the launch of the
Startup Tracker search engine web app alpha in June 2017.
Concurrently, a nine-month research mission was started to investigate the technical feasibility and commercial viability of open markets for structured data to streamline transaction between data sellers and buyers and unlock unutilized/underutilized data scattered across public and private platforms.
November 2017
Startup Tracker search engine (3.0) released.
January 2018
The DX Network's development starts, joins Imperial College VCC accelerator.
After 9 months of preparation work, development of the DX Network starts as the team joins one of the premier accelerators for Science and Technology ventures in the UK at Imperial College London (8th best university in the world, QS World University Rankings 2018).
April 2018
First prototype, pilot group assembled, key technical advisors added.
A pilot with 15 organisations in the Tech sector is launched to iterate over early versions of the DX Network and guide its development with real-world
use cases.
Key technical expertise in knowledge representation is brought onboard to fulfill use case requirements. The DX Network evolves to incorporate a Semantic Web layer alongside its core blockchain component.
September 2018
Team selected for Y Combinator Startup School 2018 (advisor track) and community sale.
The DX Network's team is selected by Y Combinator out of 15,000 applicants for the full advisor track of Startup School 2018—joining a network of 2,800 founders across 140 countries with direct access to advisors from Y Combinator.
A community sale of DX Tokens is opened for early supporters of the network before the full public offering.
October 2018
Alpha release on Ethereum testnet, launch of DX Dev Grants.
Developer preview of the DX Network launches on Ethereum testnet together with the first SDK for partners and prospective users to prepare for integration.
Key pilot programs launched with select prospective data sellers and buyers, which marks the launch of the DX alliance, regrouping organizations and individuals developing new applications on top of the DX Network.
The first DX Dev Grants are awarded from the DX Network’s Growth Fund to encourage development of new ventures leveraging the DX Network and to help developers get their applications to market.
Q1 2019
Stable release deployed on Ethereum mainnet, further round of DX Dev Grants.
The first stable version of the DX Network deploys on the Ethereum mainnet. Network nodes—including Startup Tracker—start buying and selling real data using DX Tokens.
A second round of DX Dev Grants are awarded to developers building commercial and research applications leveraging the DX Network to drive industry adoption and pre-populate the upcoming DX App Store.
Pilot programs, promotional efforts and developer outreach continue.
Q2 2019
DX App Store launch including fiat payment gateways, GUI and 3rd party applications.
The DX App Store launches to help applications build on top of the DX Network, reach their target market and bind the ecosystem of DX Network powered applications together.
Featured applications include applications developed by 3rd party developers and the DX Network team e.g. fiat payment gateways to enable the use of the network without requiring the purchase of DX Tokens, extensions/plugins to allow direct DX Network data access in productivity software and a graphical user interface to allow for visual data exploration on the network.
Q4 2019
Moving towards DX for X: new data marketplaces and added data type support.
To enable the creation of further industry-specific data marketplaces on DX, the network infrastructure implements support for the sale of data assets beyond structured data such as time series data and documents as well as support for custom data models (marketplaces are defined by their data model).
This significantly increases the DX Network’s underlying dataset size by allowing for new types of datapoints to be bought and sold on the network and expand its reach to industries like Insurance, Retail, Healthcare, Transportation, Research, Education, Finance, and Entertainement.
2020
DX for X: public and private data marketplaces in any field of application.
The DX Network enables organizations to open public data marketplaces on the network or their own private marketplaces and brings infrastructure-level support for big-ticket data and sensitive operating environments—making the DX Network a cornerstone technology of the data economy.
