Referable NFT-based Revenue Allocation Mechanism in Data Marketplace

Nowadays, data are regarded as an intangible asset. In the data marketplace, data are treated as a commodity or service, data owners can gain economic revenue by selling their data ownership or data usage rights. However, the data marketplace is facing various threats and challenges, such as unauthorized data reselling, trade of bogus data, dishonest data ownership claims, and unreasonable revenue allocation. Particularly, in the process of data resale, the revenue allocation remains a challenge when the data are processed and resold in another format. To solve this problem, we propose a revenue allocation mechanism based on the referable Non-Fungible Token (rNFT) and Shapley value method. Firstly, we tokenize the data to NFT to ensure the data ownership is traceable; Secondly, we use rNFT to record the data lineage that ensures the data owner can participate in the revenue allocation when the data are resold; Finally, we calculate the contribution of each party by the Shapley value method to ensure fairness in revenue allocation. We implement a prototype of our scheme on Ethereum and evaluate it comprehensively. The test results indicate that our scheme can meet the performance requirements of the data marketplace and improve the revenue of data owners effectively.