Multi-Blockchain Based Data Trading Markets With Novel Pricing Mechanisms

In the era of big data, there is an urgent need to establish data trading markets for effectively releasing the tremendous value of the drastically explosive data. Data security and data pricing, however, are still widely regarded as major challenges in this respect, which motivate this research on the novel multi-blockchain based framework for data trading markets and their associated pricing mechanisms. In this context, data recording and trading are conducted separately within two separate blockchains: the data blockchain (DChain) and the value blockchain (VChain). This enables the establishment of two-layer data trading markets to manage initial data trading in the primary market and subsequent data resales in the secondary market. Moreover, pricing mechanisms are then proposed to protect these markets against strategic trading behaviors and balance the payoffs of both suppliers and users. Specifically, in regular data trading on VChain-S2D, two auction models are employed according to the demand scale, for dealing with users' strategic bidding. The incentive-compatible Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) model is deployed to the low-demand trading scenario, while the nearly incentive-compatible monopolistic price (MP) model is utilized for the high-demand trading scenario. With temporary data trading on VChain-D2S, a reverse auction mechanism namely two-stage obscure selection (TSOS) is designed to regulate both suppliers' quoting and users' valuation strategies. Furthermore, experiments are carried out to demonstrate the strength of this research in enhancing data security and trading efficiency.