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How To Use Blockchain As A MarketPlace To Sell Your Own Data Posted on : Sep 18 - 2018

What if businesses, public bodies and even individuals could share all their data as widely as they wished, without worrying about it being stolen or altered? More to the point, they could sell it themselves.

That is the goal of one new start-up, CyberVein, who want to guarantee the integrity of data but using a faster proof of work concept most commonly used in digital currency.

With its blockchain-based system guaranteeing this link of shared data, CyberVein believes organizations that have so far been reluctant to share information can now be more confident in doing so.

Controlled sharing

Through a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) architecture - touted as Blockchain 3.0 - CyberVein has two functions, to protect and transfer user data while opening up a new platform for its potential sale.

For instance, it cites pharmaceutical companies and researchers into machine learning as just two examples of users who could benefit by sharing their data with others but who are also worried about potentially losing control over it.

In its White Paper, CyberVein believes that by using its system universities and research organizations would be “incentivized to perform collaborative research, maintain their heavy-duty datasets, and to make them publicly available”, while governments could be more transparent with the information they collect.

“Maintaining databases with qualities that are normally attributed to blockchains – meaning immutability, security, and transparency – makes enormous sense in a variety of industry, research and governance use cases,” says Arthur Yu, CyberVein founder who previously worked with J.P. Morgan in London and holds finance and computer science degrees from Imperial College there.

“Players in the global market often need to share information and rely on data they pool and maintain collectively. Supply chain management is one obvious scenario, but there are many more. This can be very problematic if these players have good reasons not to trust each other. Immutable, decentralized databases solve this gracefully,” he says.

CyberVein makes this possible by employing blockchain technology. The basic principle resembles that used to secure digital currencies such as Bitcoin: multiple records are kept of all data, stored on a distributed network. Only if all those copies of the records agree that a certain data item is valid will it be accepted as correct.

This means there’s no single “master record” that can be hacked – an unauthorized change to one copy of the data will easily be detected and rejected because the others won’t match up.

In the case of Bitcoin, the data items might be financial transactions. With CyberVein, they can be any kind of information. View More