I have reviewed quite a few projects in the data trade/exchange sector recently, but there is never too many so I am going to tell you about another data marketplace today. This one is still low-profile and is called SciDex.
The Idea
SciDex is a data market project but it evolves around scientific data. As you already know from my previous reviews, the current data market is controlled by middleman companies and lacks transparency and accountability.
Scientific data is dominated by large corporations and entities that prevent innovative but small start-ups from utilizing these corpora and thus hinder the development of projects in many sectors.
SciDex seeks to build a secure and simple ecosystem in which data providers and data users will be able to exchange, sell and buy data in a fair and transparent manner. The SciDex Marketplace will feature "a global index for scientific data listings" and AI tools that allow creating smart datasets.
SciDex community will include data providers, data buyers, data curators and scientists. All of them will be able to benefit from the platform either by publishing and monetizing their data or acquiring data required for their professional needs. Moreover, the platform will enable participants to place calls for contributions, calls for references or call for services whenever the need for one of these arises.
The community members will have a ranking in the ecosystem and therefore will be interested in maintaining and improving their reputation. Top level members will hold the rank of Trusted Members that gives them the benefit of voting on investment and subsidy decisions, establishing regulations for the community and vouching for other Trusted Members. They will also serve as one of two security mechanisms in the ecosystem (the second being security deposits) to prevent Sybil attacks, when attacker creates multiple identities in order to gain influence in the system. Therefore, it will be unfeasible/impossible for the attacker to create multiple Trusted Member identities.
The Technology
As already mentioned, the platform features AI (Artificial Intelligence) and NLP (Natural Language Processing) that help create rich metadata framework allowing for easier access to the data. It will also include the proprietary Ricardian Adaptive Smart Contracts (RASC) that will enable marketplace participants to exchange data using SCIE tokens. The system will have the following structure:
As you can see, there is SciDex indexation engine that allows data providers to index their datasets. There will also be a smart search engine SciEngine that will not only help to look for certain data but will also provide users with recommendations based on their interests.
The data will come from the Data Providers Registry which will rank providers according to the quality of data. Moreover, they will have to pass a probation period by staking SCIE tokens. In addition to this, the submitted data will be reviewed by data curators in exchange for token rewards.
The governance will consist of three tiers including the SciDex Foundation (comprised of 9 elected board members), Committee of Scientific Experts that will consist of 9 members appointed by the Foundation, and Trusted Members mentioned above. All three tiers will have equal voting powers, and Trusted Members will receive special non-transferable and non-fungible (unique) tokens that can be used only for voting in the ecosystem.
This is a very brief overview of the ecosystem and I highly recommend reading through the Whitepaper to learn more details.
The Token
I mentioned the SCIE token and its purpose already, however at the time of writing there were no token metrics available yet.
The Team and Advisors
The team has a strong educational background and professional experience at international companies. Co-Founder and Co-CEO Alex Bouaziz is MIT alumnus and also Co-Founder of blockchain collectibles project CryptoFighters. The second Co-Founder and Co-CEO Shuo Wang also graduated from MIT and spent several years there designing robots and exoskeletons. CTO Ofer Simon was a lead developer and game designer for CryptoFighters and worked with other less-known companies. Another MIT graduate and CFO Pierre Bi spend some time at The Boston Consulting Group and Bosch. He is also the CEO of Novobit AG, a Swiss telecom company. VP for Research and Development Philippe Bouaziz is the owner of Prodware, a French software company that has partnership with Microsoft.
Advisors look very impressive and include Harward alumnus Elie Galam who has experience with such major investment companies as BlueMountain and Two Sigma; Jia Tian who worked for Baidu and Alibaba and is currently employed by Blockchain Data Foundation and advises such projects as IOST, DDEX and CNN Blockchain; Franck Cohen who spent almost 10 years with SAP, and Michael Shmilov, the current COO of Viber. Carnegie Mellon's graduate Ben Maurer was one of the developers of reCAPTCHA that was acquired by Google in 2009 and also worked for Facebook.
The Product
According to the roadmap, the team is currently working on various components of the future ecosystem while the project is in the pre-sale stage. The beta version of SciDex is expected to be released in Q4 2018.
Conclusion
SciDex is another venture in the Big Data sector which is gaining more and more traction among blockchain enthusiasts. SciDex seems to have identified a perfect niche where the disruptive technology can be used and will have high demand. Having some academic background myself, I can say that scientific data is often scattered across various sources and is extremely difficult to consolidate. Therfore, a marketplace for this type of data can become a popular solution both for the academia and small and medium-sized businesses (not to mention large corporations). The team is rather young and ambitious but it seems to have necessary background to be able to deliver what SciDex seeks to achieve. And don't forget how strong the advisors look and what they can bring into the project. Since we don't know the token metrics yet and the results of the pre-sale, it is hard to predict how successful the project might become but it has all necessary pre-conditions for this.
More info about SciDex:
SciDex website: https://www.scidex.co
SciDex Telegram: https://t.me/SciDexOfficial
SciDex Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/scidexofficial
SciDex Whitepaper: https://www.docdroid.net/PIjN2WB/scidex-whitepaper.pdf
This article is not a buy/sell recommendation. I am not a financial adviser and you should do your own research before investing in any project.
Thanks for reading, stay tuned for other reviews and feel free to upvote, resteem and follow me!