News
Blockchains important for data ownership, University of Oulu, Last updated: 9.12.2024
Lohkoketjut tärkeitä tiedon omistajuuden kannalta, Oulun yliopisto, Viimeksi päivitetty: 9.12.2024
Hyväntekeväisyyttä pahamaineisella tekniikalla, Kaleva, Julkaistu: 5.12.2024
Background
Blockchain technology is experiencing widespread adoption across diverse industries, with finance emerging as an initial sector of interest. The interest in blockchain technology stems from its inherent qualities, including alternative trust-assumptions, immutability, verifiability and safer, faster and more transparent transactions.
Less studied opportunities are arising from the transparent nature of onchain data—the transparent and publicly accessible information stored on blockchains. Onchain analytics refers to the analysis of this data. Currently, onchain data predominantly relates to financial applications like DeFi. Ongoing adoption is expected to diversify the data spectrum. In the future onchain data potentially forms a comprehensive and uniform dataset, that spans a wide range of data from market data to healthcare data and demographic data to environmental data. Analytics performed on this uniquely comprehensive dataset can be used to detect previously undetected correlations and systemic trends. In general, onchain analytics can support datadriven decision making in diverse contexts and be utilized for research purposes.
In addition to public accessibility and uniformity, onchain data has high data integrity. Blockchains safeguard this integrity by implementing cryptographic techniques, like cryptographic signatures and hash functions. These qualities of onhchain data make it an increasingly promising fit for AI. Onchain is an interesting option for storing, verifying and proving detailed information about datasets and methods used in the process of creating AI models. Additionally, blockchain offers potential pathways for decentralizing AI governance and establishing consensus-driven AI solutions.
Project Information
As interest in leveraging onchain data grows, there arises a need for tools capable of efficiently gathering and managing it. This project focuses on the design, implementation, and utility of a proof-of-concept software solution created for the purpose of systematically collecting, analysing and acting upon onchain data.
This project is developed as part of Metapilot Factory, a project that aims to strengthen the expertise of higher education institutions, micro- and small-sized enterprises (SMEs) in metaverse technologies in Northern Ostrobothnia. Metapilot Factory project is co-funded by the European Union and council of Oulu region.
Pilot use cases
To showcase the wide range of opportunities enabled by onchain data, OnchainApp implements two pilot use cases.
Web3 Art Exhibition
The Finnish National Gallery’s Metagallery is an innovative pilot initiative exploring the integration of Web3 technologies within art institutions. This project recreated Finland's Pavilion from the 1900 Paris World's Fair, with artworks represented onchain as ERC721 tokens. Visitors participated in determining future exhibitions through a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) voting mechanism on the blockchain.
OnchainApp performs analytical tasks on the exhibition's onchain data and, based on the insights gained, mints NFTs for selected visitors from the National Gallery’s public domain art archives.
Tokenization
Tokenization related data is a rapidly growing subset of onchain data. OnchainApp demonstrates how fund managers can utilize blockchains and onchain data for managing a tokenized fund. Blockchains offer efficient transactions, but inorder to fully serve the purposes of finance, the funds need to be connected to various data. To leverage the transparency of onchain data, OnchainApp provides methods for visualizing fund-related data for investors and auditors.
Collaboration
A key project partner, Space and Time (SXT), a decentralized data warehouse and a ZK-enabled blockchain, provides core functionality for the pilot software, enabling the conducting of analytics on indexed onchain data.
Fidos Oy, a decentralized infrastrucure provider, co-authored a technology report focusing on blockchain fundamentals, decentralized application development and decentralized infrastructure.
Publications
Kaisto, J., Juutilainen, T., & Kauranen, J. (2024). Non-fungible Tokens, Tokenization, and Ownership. Computer Law and Security Review.
Kauranen J., Janhonen E., Fidos Oy, & Peura S., Fidos Oy. (2024). Blockchain: From Concepts to Application.
Contact information
Joona Kauranen
joona.kauranen@oulu.fi
Ruut Tikkanen
ruut.tikkanen@oulu.fi