Germany-based open-source blockchain network IOTA has joined forces with Microsoft, Volkswagen and Samsung Group to launch a secure data marketplace, Reuters reported.

IOTA co-founder David Sønstebø made the announcement this week. He said that the objective is to create a marketplace for data that can be bought and sold by companies.

“The data marketplace is a completely separate project that simply utilizes the underlying IOTA protocol,” Sønstebø told Reuters.

While the amount of digital data is growing exponentially, more than 99 percent is wasted due to the lack of the ability of the owners to securely sell or share this data, IOTA noted. By harnessing blockchain technology, IOTA is seeking to address this problem.

Sønstebø explained that when data is put on IOTA’s decentralized ledger, it is distributed to the innumerable nodes of the network, which makes data tampering impossible. The project partners will provide data within their sector.

“The goal is to enable a very diverse and open data marketplace...which incentivizes a free flow of data between entities,” Sønstebø said. “IOTA is kind of the first distributed ledger that goes beyond the blockchain. We got rid of the blocks and we got rid of the chains, which has resulted in getting rid of the major pain points or limitations of the blockchain such as fees, scalability, and centralization.”