FileBounty: Fair Data Exchange

TL;DR

FileBounty is a trust-free, cryptographically secure protocol enabling fair digital content exchange with minimal on-chain transactions, ensuring integrity and incentivizing honest behavior in peer-to-peer markets.

Contribution

It introduces a novel deposit refunding scheme and a protocol that guarantees fair exchange with minimal blockchain interactions, even in multi-party settings.

Findings

Achieves fair exchange with only three on-chain transactions.

Guarantees honest behavior as a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium.

Supports multi-party peer-to-peer file selling.

Abstract

Digital contents are typically sold online through centralized and custodian marketplaces, which requires the trading partners to trust a central entity. We present FileBounty, a fair protocol which, assuming the cryptographic hash of the file of interest is known to the buyer, is trust-free and lets a buyer purchase data for a previously agreed monetary amount, while guaranteeing the integrity of the contents. To prevent misbehavior, FileBounty guarantees that any deviation from the expected participants' behavior results in a negative financial payoff; i.e. we show that honest behavior corresponds to a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium. Our novel deposit refunding scheme is resistant to extortion attacks under rational adversaries. If buyer and seller behave honestly, FileBounty's execution requires only three on-chain transactions, while the actual data is exchanged off-chain in an efficient and privacy-preserving manner. We moreover show how FileBounty enables a flexible peer-to-peer setting where multiple parties fairly sell a file to a buyer.