Earn tokens for sharing your data with Datum
With Datum users can store structured data securely in a decentralized way on a smart contract blockchain. More and more data is created and this data is mostly stored by large companies. If users sign up to a service, then the data is owned by the company that offers the service and not by the individual users. This gives the companies a lot of power because they can use it in every possible way and sell the data of the users, which don’t get anything from the service provider. Big companies like Facebook or Google earn billions of dollars every year from the data of the users.
Datum wants to enable for users to store data on a public blockchain. The DAT token is used to for data storage and sharing. Datum has a data marketplace which enables users to monetize their data. It gives users full control of the privacy of their data. To interact with Datum, they have created a client for various platforms such as mobile and desktop. The first client will be created for IOS and Android. With this application the users have an overview of their stored data, they have an overview of their DAT tokens, they have simple privacy controls and users have detailed data access reports. The data consumers can request data and it is up to the individual users if they share the data. The Datum network is made up of three different types of parties and stakeholders:
- Users: can monetize and store data in a secure way
- Consumers: have direct access to data and have lower costs by eliminating the costs of a middleman.
- Storage nodes: get rewards for storing data and compute power.
To store all this data in a decentralized way BigchainDB and IPFS is used. All data on Datum is encrypted with the AES encryption standard. The data is encrypted and then stored in an immutable and decentralized way. The data is also stored in an anonymous way. Datum wants also to enable to make data free as open data. Initially on the Datum network the data validation has to be done buy the buyers, but they plan to a trust ranking system for all users.
DAT is a utility token, which is used for the data marketplace and participation as storage node in the network. To participate in the Datum network as data seller, storage node or data buyer DAT tokens are destroyed. To store DAT tokens in the network data owners, have to send DAT tokens to the storage nodes. Then when a data buyer wants to buy data they have to send DAT tokens to the data owners. Datum has created 3 billion DAT tokens and 1.53 (51%) tokens were available in a public crowdsale. The supply of the DAT tokens is fixed.
The project started in 2016 with a concept development. In June 2017 the whitepaper and concept validation was released. In October the token sale started till the end of November 2017. The test network was released in December 2017. In June 2018 was the Datum main network launch. In June 2019 they want to release an SDK which lets the developers use the platform as a decentralized database for any personal data collected by the service.