User Data Sharing Frameworks: A Blockchain-Based Incentive Solution
This addresses the need for data owners to have control and incentives in sharing their data, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing blockchain and smart contract technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of verifiable tracking and incentivization in user data sharing by proposing a blockchain- and smart contracts-based framework that allows users to control and get rewards from sharing their data, with results showing quick node responses and befitting transaction costs in all tested cases.
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.