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Datum – Have Full Control Over Your Data And Trade It For Rewards

datum ico marketplace social data

The modern data industry, while gigantic, is affected by a large number of disadvantages to the source of data themselves – the users.

Data from users are collected automatically and (quietly) by large corporations like Facebook and Apple which are then used to form its advertising channels and sold for large amounts of money.

Google will generate over $70 billion this year in revenue from advertising alone while Facebook trails behind with roughly $35 billion from its Facebook Ads platform.

Like every internet user, the things you use every day like Facebook and Google are free which is always great.

In fact, more and more platforms are beginning to provide customers a service at no cost to the delight of their users.

With a quarter of the world’s population using these platforms, it is no surprise that the data industry is extremely valuable to companies.

The reality is that free services are not exactly free as promoted by these platforms. Users are “paying” for the free services by giving away their data for advertising purposes.

All of the data is also shared and analyzed by businesses to be used in the future which extends the situation.

Users should remember that data is valuable and it is always yours. When you use these services, you no longer own the rights to your own data.

Instead, your personal data is sold by businesses who make billions off your privacy.

While this article is not meant to paint these corporations in a bad light, it does highlight a prevalent problem in the data industry.

Introducing Datum

datum logoOne blockchain startup – Datum wants to solve this problem.

How will they do that?

Datum allows users to store data from things they use every day like social media platforms or smartphone apps on the Datum database.

First off, data owners (users) pay a small fee in DAT (the tokens used in the Datum platform) to store their data in the 100% secure and private blockchain database.

What makes it unique is that data is stored privately in the database is encrypted and secured by the blockchain technology.

Instead of invading your privacy, Datum lets you make choices about what you want to do with your data and whom you want to allow access to your data to (you can even deny access altogether) all in one simple app.

Because the blockchain protects your data, no business or corporation can access it unless you explicitly give them the permission to do so.

So, why would you share data to these companies anyway?

Datum is also a secure and decentralized marketplace for data which means everyone who trades data on the platform is compensated fairly.

Companies would have to pay users to access data, allowing you to make money off sharing your data and not giving it away for free without your knowledge or consent.

Although businesses will always have a need for data, the Datum platform allows you to choose which of these businesses can have access to your data while at the same time, be compensated for sharing data.

Backing up the project is an extremely strong team with over 80 years of combined experience in the industry.

The founders and main developers of Datum have also led and complete projects that involve building large-scale data processing and management systems, something that is completely relevant to the vision of Datum.

How does Datum work?

Datum engineers a solution for the data-sharing problem by using tokenization.

First off, data owners (users) pay a small fee in DAT (the tokens used in the Datum platform) to store their data in the 100% secure and private blockchain database.

This blockchain platform where all client data is stored is built on a protected, decentralized NoSQL database.

Data is then stored on nodes by miners (people or computers who process data on the blockchain) which means that miners only provide storage facilities and are paid a small fee by data owners for their services.

Again, miners only store data, they don’t have access to it nor do they have the permission to do so.

For the user interface, Datum uses a simple and user-friendly application (available on mobile devices too) for users to allow or disallow access to their data.

Companies who want access to data must pay the owners in DAT. They will only have access to it after the payment is confirmed which will then release data according to terms agreed by the data owner.

The DAT will then be paid to data owners which provides an ecosystem of data-trading between users and companies.

The Datum app also makes it simple for users to find out their total earnings. With the app, you can view your data-sharing earnings from platforms like Facebook or Twitter.

datum app overview

A thing to note about Datum is that they apply a deflationary strategy to the tokens. They do this by proposing to burn DAT tokens used in transactions, therefore correlating deflation with the number of transactions.

Benefits of the Datum platform

The Datum platform offers several benefits to users:

1.Data ownership and authority is finally returned to users

Unlike modern data practices, Datum finally gives users 100% ownership and authority over their data by giving them the ability to control whom they share their data with and at what price.

Datum also provides an open API for developers to use the full set of tools running the platform.

2.Datum provides fair economic opportunities to miners

Miners who help Datum store data on low-latency servers are rewarded with DAT.

There’s nothing fancy needed to store data; all you need is a simple hard-disk and a decent Internet connection and you’ll be able to earn DAT.

3.Datum helps SMEs grow

By revolutionizing the data-sharing relationship between businesses and users, SMEs get to have a bigger and more refined access to data.

At this moment, businesses have to rely on Google or Facebook APIs to use data which comes with its own limitations and weaknesses.

Datum app

By using Datum, businesses can directly buy data that they actually want from users without the need of a middleman.

Participating in the Datum token sale

Datum will be launching a token sale for the DAT tokens on the 29th of October to the 29th of November or until the target funding is reached.

The funds collected during the crowdsale will be used for the operations of the business as well as developing the platform (test network coming in 2017), but the fully featured platform will be launched in first half of 2018.

To participate in the ICO or learn more about the project, click here to head over to Datum’s official homepage