Inspiration
Give people power over their data, tailoring their digital experience while profiting from it.
What it does
It gives the user the control over which data attributes they're willing to share, collects & processes it to generate aggregated anonymized data segments relevant for almost all business use cases. The system uses a smart contract deployed on a blockchain as multiple functions with unique addresses that can be called by any user of the blockchain to request the data. Also ‘events’ are used to log and broadcast messages to all miners and user participants on the blockchain. Users with shared attributes contributing in the data collection and aggregation are rewarded accordingly.
How we built it
The system was built using Ethereum smart contracts & an engine running as a micro-service to collect, aggregate and process the data. The data collector makes an ether deposit to the smart contract through the payable deposit function, which records the amount the customer deposits and adds it to the existing deposit, if any. The contract then checks if the customer has the proper subscription and if so, the contract sends a token to the customer. Accessing event is logged (with parameters that include the customer's address, token, requested data). The event messages are publicly broadcasted and captured by all Ethereum nodes including the customer and the micro-service. The micro-service will use the token to authenticate the customer off the chain. Authentication is done by requiring the customer to send the same token but signed by the customer's private key. Once authenticated by the micro-service, the customer will be given access to the data segments.
Challenges we ran into
How to model the user's profile/asset. How to make sure the data is always updated and segmented to keep it relevant and demanded. How to automate/manage payments for multiple users that contributed in the data segments using the smart contract, since smart contracts are usually implemented in a one to one approach where in our example a data collector can send a request to one owner through the smart contract and the money then is transferred to this owner directly after fulfilling the contract requirements.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Getting around the idea of smart contracts that was technically challenging to implement and understand with its unfamiliar concepts.
What we learned
How to manage a blockchain smart contract and how can we use data as a profitable asset while benefiting from the perks of sharing it (i.e how it would impact the digital experience positively which would reflect in better ads, more relatable content,... etc.)
What's next for SEACRED
Integrate an ML model to better study the data, building a complete persona for the user, resulting in a closer matched, more reliable and relevant data segments which would raise the value of the data and profit for the user and business.
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