Towards a decentralized infrastructure for data marketplaces: narrowing the gap between academia and industry

One big challenge for Industry 4.0 is leveraging the large amount of data that remain unused after collection. A variety of commercial data marketplaces have emerged in recent years to tackle this task. Despite their different business models and target markets, such marketplaces share a number of common issues that slow the growth of the industry, including data discovery, transparency, data privacy and data valuation. Many academic designs have been proposed to address these issues, yet most of them remain unimplemented, due to complexity or inefficiency.

We argue that these issues can be addressed with a combination of blockchain-based infrastructure, privacy-preserving computing and machine learning-based valuation metrics. Furthermore, we discuss key enabling technologies in each of these areas that are feasible to deploy at scale and could thus be implemented in real-world marketplaces in the near future. We select such technologies based on their current maturity and their industrial prominence.