User Incentives for Blockchain-based Data Sharing Platforms

TL;DR

This paper proposes incentive mechanisms using smart contracts for blockchain-based data sharing platforms, addressing the challenge of motivating data owners to share data at scale.

Contribution

It introduces novel incentive models and simulates their effectiveness in encouraging data sharing on blockchain platforms.

Findings

Cost compensation models can quickly cover data sharing costs.

Incentive mechanisms balance interests of data owners and requesters.

Simulation results show improved data sharing motivation.

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 propose incentive mechanisms for decentralized data-sharing platforms. We use smart contracts to automate different payment options between data owners and data requesters. We discuss multiple cost pricing scenarios for data owners to monetize their data. Moreover, we simulate the incentive mechanisms on a blockchain-based data-sharing platform. The evaluation of our simulation indicates that a cost compensation model for the data owner can rapidly cover the cost of data sharing and balance the overall incentives for all the actors in the platform.