Price Discovery Methods of Data Assets on Decentralized Marketplaces

Since the inception of Bitcoin in 2009, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has started a paradigm shift in how we manage our valuables and how power and authority should be distributed based on economic incentives, rather than being in the hands of a central authority. DLT enables transparency, the immutability of historical records, censorship resistance, private ownership and decentralization of power. In 2015, with the inception of Ethereum, many more use-cases for value transfer on DLT emerged. Due to turing-complete smart-contracts, ‘if this, then that’ statements and other logic can now be processed in a decentralized manner. In 2020, the main advancements in the world of blockchain and cryptocurrencies could be found in the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) sphere. Decentralized Exchange (DEX) protocols, Lending protocols, Margin trading and scalability solutions have led to a 100x increase in the Total Value Locked (TVL) in these protocols - from $900 million to $90 billion. With an elaborate description of these tools at hand, this master thesis describes in what ways corporations and governments can start monetizing their data, why they should do this, and what problems they might come across. The main problem with data sharing is that the owner loses control and provenance. Governments and corporations have data, but are afraid to share this. On the other hand there are AI and ML researchers that have the algorithms, but not the data to train their algorithms. The subject of this master thesis is as follows: ‘Price Discovery Methods of Data Assets on Decentralized Marketplaces’