The advent of blockchain infrastructures paves the way for a new domain of data vending, allowing individual data owners to directly benefit from sharing proprietary data that is both compliant with regulators and immutable. In the era of big data, vast amounts of data have been used to improve decision making for industries, namely through building personalized recommender systems, and targeted advertisements. As a result, organizations that collect and aggregate data at scale stand to profit enormously in the process. However, as data stakeholders, the users from whom the data is collected from rarely get their share of dividends despite significant contributions to the fortune. In fact, in most cases, organizations regard collected data as their private assets and prevent the data from being shared even for research purposes, which could otherwise contribute to the advancement of our society.

In combination with Dr. Jiayu Zhou and Fengyi Tang as leads of Michigan State University and Dr. He Zhu and Ning Nan (Founder) of BitOcean, the Chief Scientist of VeChain, Dr. Ziheng Zhou, has published a Distributed Data Vending on a Blockchain whitepaper proposing a solution for allowing proprietary data to be securely exchanged via a blockchain. This whitepaper was offered as a continuation of the VeResearch program which Michigan State joined on January 31st, 2018.

This VeChain exclusive system is already being developed in-house and by enterprises for upcoming dApps and coin issuances.

Data vending is the exchange of private data between individual data providers (owners) and data consumers via a protected system that uniquely adapts to uses cases. The purpose of distributed data vending is to enable data providers to use existing blockchains as infrastructure to list the data securely and apply to regulations and compliance needs. Data consumers then retrieve data from the blockchain and complete the purchase. The entire data exchange process is done without trusted third parties involved.