User incentives for blockchain-based data sharing platforms

Abstract

Data sharing is very important for accelerating scientific research, business innovations, and for informing individuals. Yet, concerns over data privacy, cost, and lack of secure data-sharing solutions have prevented data owners from sharing data. To overcome these issues, several research works have proposed blockchain-based data-sharing solutions for their ability to add transparency and control to the data-sharing process. Yet, while models for decentralized data sharing exist, how to incentivize these structures to enable data sharing at scale remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we study different incentive mechanisms for decentralized data-sharing platforms. Smart contracts are used to automate different payment options between data owners and data requesters. We evaluate multiple cost pricing scenarios for data monetization by simulating incentive mechanisms on a blockchain-based data-sharing platform. We show that a cost compensation model for the data owner rapidly cover the cost of data sharing and balance the overall incentives for all the actors in the platform.