User Data Sharing Frameworks: A Blockchain-Based Incentive Solution

TL;DR

This paper introduces a blockchain-based framework enabling users to share research data securely, verifiably, and with control, incentivizing sharing through smart contracts that track access and provenance.

Contribution

It presents a novel blockchain and smart contract framework for user-controlled data sharing, verification, and incentivization, with an evaluation of transaction costs.

Findings

Nodes responded quickly in all test cases

Transaction costs were acceptable for deployment

Framework supports verifiable data provenance

Abstract

Currently, there is no universal method to track who shared what, with whom, when and for what purposes in a verifiable way to create an individual incentive for data owners. A platform that allows data owners to control, delete, and get rewards from sharing their data would be an important enabler of user data-sharing. We propose a usable blockchain- and smart contracts-based framework that allows users to store research data locally and share without losing control and ownership of it. We have created smart contracts for building automatic verification of the conditions for data access that also naturally supports building up a verifiable record of the provenance, incentives for users to share their data and accountability of access. The paper presents a review of the existing work of research data sharing, the proposed blockchain-based framework and an evaluation of the framework by measuring the transaction cost for smart contracts deployment. The results show that nodes responded quickly in all tested cases with a befitting transaction cost.