As people engage more deeply and often with Internet services like social media, search, and e-retail, they create ever more data. Well known social-media companies and a secretive data-brokerage industry monetize this personal data without explicitly consulting—or sharing the revenues with—the users who produced the content. Such is the dominant personal-data ecosystem. There is clear need for a transparent and fair data exchange based upon the expressive consent of the Internet users producing the data. This whitepaper specifies such a system built upon a user-controlled ”DataWallet” and a blockchain-based smart contract system to allow transparent and mutually beneficial exchange of data between consenting parties. We detail the requirements of such a system, its necessary structure, and the dynamic interactions of its components and stakeholders through an example focusing on a simple exchange of data for DXT (the data exchange token). We show how such an exchange is just one of many use cases for the proposed data exchange by describing how it can provide an augmented user experience for online video and music services as well as provide valuable insights to data creators about themselves.
Keywords: data exchange, blockchain, smart contract, decentralized, peer-to-peer
datawallet
