Datum is actually a very simple idea. It is a Dapp that store organized data (so, rather databases than pictures) and creates an economic ecosystem around it. Anyone is able to store data on the Datum network by being a data node while anyone sending data to the network becomes a data source. On top of that, anyone is able to sell the data he owns or buy the data he wants on the Datum marketplace. Those who store and share their data are paid with DAT tokens. And that’s pretty it! No impossible promise like “We re-order Universe’s atoms”, just a Dapp which enhances how we deal and interact with data, and it’s a good point for a start.
How it works
Datum works essentially like a marketplace where data consumers and data sources make each other offers for specific types of data, with money (tokens) being involved. The whitepaper is advertising an phone app that will be the gate to the marketplace. With this Datum client, you will be able to browse offers and trace your transactions. The whitepaper explains that storage nodes host data and provide computing power. They are incentivized by perceiving fees from every transaction, like a “proof of storage” mining: “Storage Nodes are economically incentivized by DAT Token rewards, paid out as a fixed percentage of each transaction and shared amongst storage nodes according to their contribution of resources” . Unfortunately, technical and financial descriptions how the storage nodes work are mostly absent of the Whitepaper. We would like to know, by example, if the Datum network can be used as a backup storage.
The data is encrypted but is meant to not be permanent. In fact, the data stays in the Datum network as long as someone is paying for it: “Data is stored as long as storage is paid for, by either:
● Data Source
● Data Consumer
So, users (data sources) make transactions with data consumers about sharing some data and they both pay a fee to the data nodes for the data storage. This makes perfect sense, but we still wonder things like in which ways the payment is related to the expiration of the data.
Also, it seems that Datum is going to bridge with several blockchains. They plan integration with Civic to enhance KYC procedures and they plan to use BigChainDB to cover their data storage needs as following: “Storage Nodes are part of the BigchainDB cluster that allows Datum to provide global scale storage of submitted data”.
Competitors
Despite a whitepaper that makes the project looking like it is at the embryonic stage, the idea behind it is interesting and relevant to the Dapps market’s needs. Right now, we can say that the document storage field (pictures, videos, …) is quite full with competitors like Storj, Sia, IPFS or Swarm. But what about metadata storage? There is a few that proposes a working product in beta stage. Both Tierion and Po.et allow anyone to store metadata on the Bitcoin blockchain, while IPDB already works for the Ethereum network with BigChainDB. The economy side of Datum seems more conceptually advanced though, thanks to the marketplace idea. The contender, here, would eventually be Enigma Catalyst, but its data marketplace idea is more focused on algorithms than pure metadata. Datum still definitively has a card to play in the current context.
The idea of Datum is nice and comes at the right time to help better define the decentralized data storage and sharing market. The major asset of Datum is its desire to propose an easy to access marketplace where anyone can buy or sell personal data. Such a network is likely to complement already developing decentralized storage solutions if it succeeds in bringing a working economical ecosystem upon existing data networks. If the Datum network becomes adopted for its marketplace, this may lead to very interesting transformations regarding how metadata is collected and used. Decentralised Facebook-like Dapps or various IoT based applications could both be important data sources and consumers operating with Datum.
Website: https://datum.org/
Apps: https://app.datum.org/
Whitepaper : https://datum.org/assets/Datum-WhitePaper.pdf
Telegram: https://t.me/datumnetwork
This article was created in exchange for a potential token reward through Bounty0x