Trust-Free Blockchain Framework for AI-Generated Content Trading and Management in Metaverse

The rapid development of the metaverse and generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) has led to the emergence of AI-Generated Content (AIGC). Unlike real-world products, AIGCs are represented as digital files, thus vulnerable to plagiarism and leakage on the Internet. In addition, the trading of AIGCs in the virtual world is prone to various trust issues between the involved participants. For example, some customers may try to avoid the payment after receiving the desired AIGC products, or the content sellers refuse to grant the products after obtaining the license fee. Existing digital asset management (DAM) systems often rely on a trusted third-party authority to mitigate these issues. However, this might lead to centralization problems such as the single-point-of-failure (SPoF) when the third parties are under attacks or being malicious. In this paper, we propose MetaTrade, a blockchain-empowered DAM framework that is designed to tackle these urgent trust issues, offering secured AIGC trading and management in the trustless metaverse environment. MetaTrade eliminates the role of the trusted third party, without requiring trust assumptions among participants. Numerical results show that MetaTrade offers higher performance and lower trading cost compared to existing platforms, while security analysis reveals that the framework is resilient against plagiarism, SPoF, and trust-related attacks. To showcase the feasibility of the design, a decentralized application (DApp) has been built on top of MetaTrade as a marketplace for metaverse AIGCs.