Decentralized Data Markets with Filehive
Recently, Filecoin-based data marketplace Filehive launched its beta app for public use. Filehive is built and maintained by OB1, a dapp development studio that has been behind OpenBazaar and Haven.
Filehive is an open source marketplace to upload, maintain, buy, and/or grant datasets. The Filehive project came out of the Filecoin Grants Program and is built on top of Filecoin, Powergate, and Loom. It leverages the Filecoin network to incentivize the storage and licensing of datasets, which are retrieved from the IPFS network.
Data is the most important and valuable digital asset. The problem with data on the internet is that there exists no real incentive to create or maintain it other than altruism or private, corporate use. Filehive offers a solution by providing a much-needed platform for data monetization and sharing. On Filehive’s marketplace, people can upload and maintain datasets that can be browsed by platform users. These datasets can be anything: sports statistics, files, financial datasets, public records, medical statistics, and more. The person or institution that uploads a dataset can elect to share it for free or request a fee in FIL in exchange for access.
Filehive also supports a donation feature. Whenever an account is created on Filehive, a donation address is automatically generated. Filehive users can elect to donate FIL to dataset creators, providing an economic mechanism to support the maintenance and sharing of datasets, particularly free datasets that can be treated as public goods and maintained with a flow of donations.
Filehive addresses the problems in dataset sharing and monetization in four ways. Filehive:
- Empowers data owners to monetize their efforts,
- Encourages data consumers to reward data custodians,
- Provides a place for curation and discovery of important data that can be used on other projects, and
- Makes available an interface to the IPFS and Filecoin networks that is simple for anyone to use.
Filehive’s mission is to encourage people to create, maintain, and share data by making it readily available and allowing people to earn FIL by participating. As an open source project, Filehive’s code can be publicly found on GitHub, and anyone in the ecosystem can use it to build dataplace solutions of their own.
Watch OB1 CEO Brian Hoffman present about Filehive in Filecoin’s February 2021 community call.
Filehive is currently live in beta for public use. Anyone can start uploading or downloading datasets and interacting with others on the marketplace. If you are a developer, a researcher, a data scientist, or someone with a passion for a particular topic or industry, come join Filehive and contribute to our growing collection of real-world data.
