Towards a Decentralized Data Marketplace for Smart Cities

One of the ways in which a city can become smarter is to grow a local economy around the sharing of data from IoT devices and other open data that can be used in applications to improve the lives of its citizens. Prior work and ongoing projects have examined or are currently focused on the development of centralized data marketplaces for smart cities. Here we explore how a decentralized data marketplace could be created using blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies. We consider the possible benefits of such a decentralized architecture, identify different elements that such a decentralized marketplace should have, and show how they could be potentially integrated into a comprehensive solution. We also present a simple smart contract implementation of a decentralized registry where data products can be posted by data owners for retrieval by potential buyers.