A Blockchain-based Data Sharing Marketplace with a Federated Learning Use Case

Abstract

Due to the sharp growth of employing mobile devices and IoT (Internet of Things) sensors in daily life, tremendous generated or collected data become one of the most valuable assets for not only users but also numerous applications, which provide various services using user data. However, a large portion of such data is possessed by only a few giant companies in a centralized manner. This incurs the concerns of how user data are harnessed and used and who can use such data because of many cases of privacy violence and data leakage. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a decentralized data sharing marketplace using Ethereum to enable users to share their data in a privacy-preserving and self-governing manner. Users can only share parts of the data from their devices they want to share in the marketplace and gain rewards from the bidding of buyers anonymously. Furthermore, a federated learning use case is demonstrated as a privacy-enhanced application of the proposed marketplace to encourage users to share processed data to avoid raw data leakage.