Centralized data marketplaces present several problems, such as expensive infrastructure costs, privacy concerns and single points of failure. By contrast, decentralized marketplaces present numerous advantages.

Product Management

Many concepts and solutions for (IoT) data marketplaces focus solely on blockchain-based data trading; however, an effective data marketplace would include other functions, including user management, device management and product management.

In, a decentralized data marketplace is proposed where providers register devices that generate different streams of data for sale to consumers who then purchase them and gain more information about the devices that generated them from a smart contract managed platform.

This system uses a proxy to reduce communication costs and enable Internet of Things devices with limited computational resources to take part in the data marketplace. Furthermore, its user-friendly interface offers users the chance to register themselves and manage their profile/devices as well as register new ones; plus it includes rating/monitoring features.

Smart Contracts

A data marketplace must offer many additional functions beyond data trading itself, including user management, device management, product management, negotiation, discovery, selection, routing, settlement and rating capabilities.

Users create their profiles through a graphical user interface (GUI), and must interact with user contracts only occasionally in order to manage them – this interaction does not entail much computational expense as it simply involves encrypting and decrypting data.

Providers can create several products to offer to consumers through product contracts. If necessary, updates or deletions can be implemented at any time by the provider. Furthermore, providers can also provide information regarding which devices produce each product – providing other users with more complete details on data quality.

Proxy

Though many ideas and solutions exist for blockchain-based data marketplaces, most focus on trading only and don’t offer additional necessary functionality such as distinguishing devices and products or providing user interfaces for consumers. Furthermore, many centralized mechanisms used for trading often result in expensive infrastructure costs, privacy concerns, single points of failure and lack of transparency.

Proxy servers allow providers to offload resource-intensive tasks like concurrent connection management and product discovery onto brokers, while at the same time protecting security of messages exchanged between providers and consumers by encrypting them with the public key of respective device contracts; this enables data delivery even when providers or proxies are offline.

Broker

Brokers facilitate communication between Internet of Things devices and consumers. Their work requires extensive resources; therefore they should be compensated appropriately. In addition, brokers provide dispute resolution between participants in data trade transactions.

Product Contract is another crucial component of a data marketplace. This smart contract oversees all products available within it, providing more details about them and registering new devices as well as performing add, update, or delete operations on them.

Propose an Internet of Things (IoT) data marketplace combining MQTT protocol with blockchain technology, providing real-time monetization of data streams using traceability solutions for publishing and subscribing operations which are paid for with its native cryptocurrency. Furthermore, this marketplace also features search capabilities to locate specific products.

User Interface

Blockchain technologies have been put forth as solutions to data marketplaces; however, most proposals and concepts only focus on trading data or provide for limited functionality.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices often do not possess many computational or energy resources, which must be considered when creating a blockchain-based data marketplace. Therefore, they must offload as many resource-intensive tasks as possible from being performed by IoT devices.

Proxy devices allow IoT devices to communicate with brokers and applications on smart contract platforms, manage products – such as data streams offered to consumers -, as well as monitor marketplaces so participants fulfill their obligations.