Big data - the flow of large volumes of information - has become paramount in today's commerce.

What was once a fantasy of the future is now a reality: massive troves of data are being generated in industries worldwide. But too often this data is not properly managed.

As the big data economy continues to emerge, businesses have the opportunity to leverage data insights as a part of their growth strategy. Unfortunately, many small and medium enterprises (SMEs) lack the knowledge and resources to accomplish this themselves. These enterprises, while often having terabytes of data nestled away within their systems, have trouble using it to inform strategic business decisions.

The startup company RepuX aims to address this inefficiency by creating a marketplace where data producers and acquirers can interact with one another. This will be achieved by connecting SMEs directly to developers through its distributed platform.

By sharing data on the RepuX platform, enterprises can sell anonymized data sets to developers who can then utilize this data to build customized applications integrating artificial intelligence and machine learning. These applications can then be sold back to the SMEs, boosting their business decisions efforts.

RepuX's blockchain-backed protocol and platform for SMEs allows various forms of corporate and user data to be monetized and exchanged between different parties. Users can earn rewards for sharing data on a secure, decentralized network.

Enabled by blockchain technology, RepuX combines multiple decentralized technologies like IPFS, Sia and Ethereum/EOS, resulting in a highly distributed marketplace for data and information.

The platform encrypts data and manages the integrity of the network through reputation scores determined by purchasers. Because trust is a key feature of the blockchain model, RepuX (through blockchain technology) can overcome the lack of trust between anonymous actors in peer-to-peer networks. Reputation incentivizes data sellers to be honest and provide the highest-quality data sets.

Eliminating the need for trust between actors on networks is seen as a promising approach for reducing fraud. Through the development of the platform, RepuX is well positioned to bring value and innovation to large-scale data tied to machine learning, big data and artificial intelligence.

"The RepuX Protocol has the potential to eliminate the 'digital divide' between those who have easy access to machine learning datasets and those who don't," states the RepuX white paper .

RepuX is being developed by a team of 14-plus people who have decades of experience in software development and enterprise software sales.

"Data has always been something that SMEs have struggled to utilize to improve their business," said Tomasz Tybon, co-founder and chief growth officer for RepuX. "So, in June of 2017 we developed this concept to create a decentralized storage system for SMEs and developers to collaborate together. We then started working on a platform, which is now live ."

Prior to launching RepuX, Tybon spent 10 years in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) industry on the marketing, sales and product development sides, with 6 years of experience in ecommerce. He also built one of Poland's biggest brands and expanded it to markets in India and Turkey, scaling its annual recurring revenues by 30 times.

Marcin Welner, Tybon's collaborator and the chief operating officer of RepuX, has a strong background of 12 years in programming, with 20 years of IT experience in total. He has extensive business knowledge in cryptocurrency, blockchain technology, warehousing, logistics, supply chain, ecommerce, inventory management and customer relationship management systems.

With companies like Salesforce, Google Apps for Work and DeepMind already making inroads in the big data curation space, RepuX has embarked on a series of strategic moves designed to position itself for the future. Most notably, in December 2017, the company signed a contract with WorkHQ, a China-based inventory management software, which will potentially provide RepuX platform access to millions of SMEs in China. Businesses utilizing WorkHQ to manage their inventory on Amazon, Shopify and other online platforms can now begin optimizing their data right away through this collaboration.

In another move, RepuX recently announced its intent to launch a token generation event (TGE) from February 6 to March 9, 2018. This follows a presale that began on November 17 of last year and is scheduled to run through January 23. This will allow cross-platform use of RepuX tokens, eliminating the need for middlemen and intermediaries across multiple industries.

The RepuX token, an ERC20 token, is the only method to pay for and sell services on the RepuX platform. These tokens can be purchased during the token campaign with a transfer of ether or bitcoin, as well as via wire transfer for the presale.

RepuX has established a hard cap of $33.1 million for its token sale, with the token distribution to investors scheduled to take place on April 10, 2018. Tokens are priced at a rate of $0.10 during the presale, rising from $0.14 to $20 during the main crowdsale.

"We are excited about providing data producers with the opportunity to create value in their data by delivering it to users in multiple industries, all while eliminating the need for intermediaries in this process," concluded Tybon. "Our ultimate goal is to build a secure, reliable, high-performance data transfer protocol that can be integrated with a wide variety of different applications developed by third parties for use by a number of different industries."

To learn more about the project, visit repux.io and the project's Facebook page , Twitter and Instagram .

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The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.