The issue that Research Data markets are dealing with right now is not floating on the surface for everyone to see; it’s quite a complex one.
However, diving deeper into the inefficiencies of data markets, both creators and consumers of research face the same obstacle to the most efficient transactions and monetization: the absence of a peer-to-peer marketplace that would provide:
- Security
- Transparency
- Clarity of provenance
- Reputation management
This inefficiency is the outcome of frameworks of traditional data trading platforms built on technologies and processes that cannot deliver on those marketplace dynamics above. The problem statement is simple, yet stifling to researchers, research data consumers, and long-term research progress itself:
Existing data markets are setting bounds for all possible economic advantages of a free market - due to no fault in the participants but rather the ability to bind technology with safe and scalable data transactional processes. Through history, there have been no sustainable multilateral or two-sided data marketplaces connecting providers of data goods to consumers of them, like Ebay, Airbnb and Uber. The best right now feature inefficient sales negotiations, “contact us” forms and privately evaluated products resulting from secret agreements with data providers. The multilateral data marketplace has issues with customer’s trust, high chances of fraud and market thickness. In two-sided exchange markets, buyers and sellers are the ones responsible for creating the bids to buy and offers to sell the product.
Datality addresses these two-sided data market challenges of the past by implementing the NEAR Protocol blockchain as its foundation, plus critical platform-economic components including (but not limited to):
- Industry-leading KYC (“Know your customer”) Security
- Escrow payment systems
- Transparent and safe Covenants
- Reputation management
- Local network effects
The NEAR Protocol blockchain activates decentralised trust, accountability, transaction permanence and ownership. The truthfulness of this approach is perfectly suitable for participants who want to protect themselves against fraud, insure users’ safety and protect the ownership of their data.
Our platform’s main value is to suit the needs of those who have and/or need valuable research data and create a foundation for specific industries, markets or locations to build front-ends suiting their own data market dynamics on top of it. Every user can track their blockchain activity via their Datality user menu, check what information is being shared with NEAR and verify every transaction’s authenticity. Each and every customer is given information on data they posted, purchased, transferred or reviewed.
Datality provides copious metadata (posting details, transaction details and user/product review details) stored on IPFS. IPFS digitally signs every piece of data, once it’s written it can never be changed (not even by Datality) without changing its signature. IPFS signatures for every metadata set are written to the NEAR blockchain, therefore forever linking on-chain data to metadata.
Datality on the NEAR blockchain is the world’s first opportunity for the private researchers to market and monetize their data directly and safely to research data consumers. Its development will bring drastic positive change to research data markets. Since May 2020, the Datality team chose NEAR as the most performant, supported, scalable and secure blockchain to build the data markets platform of the future.
However Datality will fix that! And moreover make the market more transparent, so that you know, that your money for article purchasing goes to the right person! 