Inside the FAME Marketplace. A Technical Deep Dive with Mauro Isaja – Leader of FAME WP 4 Decentralised Programmable Data Trading and Pricing
The FAME Marketplace will become Europe’s first federated, decentralised, trusted, and energy-efficient marketplace for data assets. Designed to facilitate secure and transparent data asset exchanges, FAME leverages decentralised, programmable trading models powered by blockchain tokenisation and trusted analytics.
We sat down with Mauro Isaja, who has been leading FAME’s Work Package 4 – Decentralised Programmable Data Trading and Pricing – to discuss the latest developments, challenges, further steps within the FAME project.
Q1: Can you briefly explain what FAME is?
FAME stands for “Federated decentralised trusted dAta Marketplace for Embedded finance”. It is the proof-of-concept implementation of an online marketplace for data-related assets, with a specific focus on the finance sector. While this is a spot-on description of the FAME initiative, it surely needs some more context and explanation.
Let’s start with the context: FAME is rooted in the HORIZON-CL4-2022-DATA-01-04 topic of the EU’s Horizon Europe funding programme, also known as “Technologies and solutions for data trading, monetising, exchange and interoperability”. In addition to the goals stated in the topic title, all funded projects are expected to develop and/or support data spaces deployed in real-world applications, in particular those related to the Common European Data Spaces strategy.
This means that FAME, like any other initiative in the scope of this topic, is a complex project with several different types of activities that go beyond software development and system integration. However, the Marketplace Platform (Marketplace for short), which was developed in-house and deployed on the public Internet, is indeed the core of the FAME project.
The Marketplace is both a data space and a trading environment. It enables a B2B business ecosystem where participants can share, discover and exploit what we generically refer to as “data assets”, because they are not necessarily limited to raw data: almost anything related to data and that can be monetised (e.g., a downloadable data set, a data model, a data analytics application-as-a-service, etc.) qualifies as an asset. A searchable catalogue of assets is the front-end of the FAME data space, but also the entry point for online trading – which is the most distinctive and innovative feature of the Marketplace.
It is important to note that trading in FAME is not about exchanging the IPR/ownership of the assets published in the catalogue: what is bought and sold is their usage – i.e., access to the resource for a limited time under specific terms and conditions.
Trades are made online and in real time, thanks to blockchain, smart contract and tokenisation technology. Basically, asset consumers pay with a FAME-specific digital currency called FAME Digital Euro (FDE), which has a fixed one-to-one exchange rate with the EUR. They receive a non-fungible token (NFT) as proof of payment. The NFT is then used as a digital key that unlocks access to the paid content, wherever it resides – the Marketplace does not host the actual resources, only their metadata. Asset sellers receive FDE payments in their blockchain account and can convert them into real money through FAME’s private exchange facility.
It is worth noting that, at this stage, all payments are simulated. The FDE currency works like Monopoly Money within our proof-of-concept: all users can get FDE tokens for free, and these cannot be converted into real money.
Q2: The “F” in FAME stands for “Federated”. How does the Marketplace’s federation concept work? What is the difference between the FAME Marketplace and Federation?
A federation is an association of some autonomous organisations for the pursuit of a common goal. Being part of a federation means abiding by some common rules, and this requires the existence of a central governance body. However, such governance bodies are typically small and limited in their authority to the scope of the common goal. The general definition applies to both political and business scenarios, although most real-world instances of federation exist in environments of the former category.
The FAME Marketplace is a federation because it not only provides a shared online environment for doing business with data but also implements a lightweight governance framework empowered by its own members. Basically, the Marketplace is a community of peers, where rules are enforced by technology, but the technology itself is not owned/operated by anyone in particular: blockchain, smart contracts, digital currencies, NFTs and self-sovereign identities (SSI) are the decentralised enablers of mutual trust.
Let me illustrate this big statement with a practical example. Suppose a fictional company, ACME Ltd., wants to start trading its valuable data analytics services in the FAME Marketplace. To do this, it must first become a member of the FAME Federation. Using a dedicated web application, an ACME representative applies for membership, uploading all relevant documentation. Once the formal correctness of the application has been verified, ACME is accepted as a new member by majority vote. This process, known as member onboarding, takes place entirely online. Once onboarded, ACME can:
- Contribute to the Marketplace IT infrastructure – and share responsibility for community rules enforcement – by running a node of the FAME blockchain network.
- Onboard users by issuing SSI credentials (i.e., digitally signed statements) as onboarding credentials of this kind certify that the holder is affiliated with ACME and is therefore authorised to operate in the Marketplace on its behalf.
The above tasks are optional: if ACME cannot or is not willing to perform any of them, they can be delegated to another member (if mutual trust exists) or to the federation’s central authority. Whatever the choice, once ACME is onboarded, ACME-affiliated users can create new entries in the Marketplace catalogue to advertise ACME’s data analytics services – or any other kind of digital resource that can be delivered online by ACME. Catalogue entries come with pricing information and contractual terms. Acceptance of these terms and the actual payment of the price are represented by an NFT, which customers can buy, as explained earlier, to gain access to the target resource.
Q3: Can you briefly walk us through the key technologies and components of the Marketplace and how they interact?
The Marketplace is a modular system that exposes its functionalities through an Open API – i.e., an application programming interface entirely based on web standards and best practices, like HTTPS, JWT and the REST paradigm. The Open API is implemented as a set of cloud microservices accessible from the public Internet. Any authorised application – e.g., a data space that is a registered member of the FAME Federation – can thus integrate with the Marketplace and perform the operations allowed for its profile. In fact, every single feature of the Marketplace’s website is enabled by the Open API backend.
It would be rather difficult to visualise the entire system architecture of the Marketplace without some diagrams. So, I will just highlight its main modules and explain their relationships.
At the core of the platform, we have the FDAC (Federated Data Asset Catalogue) and P&T (Provenance and Tracing) modules, working together. The former, as implied by its name, is where information on tradeable assets is made publicly available by their providers, and where published assets can be searched and discovered by potential consumers. The latter wraps the FDAC in a layer of trust: the provenance of assets in the catalogue is individually certified by a digital signature, which guarantees the integrity of metadata, and by a pointer to an immutable record that states the identity of the provider. Both the signature and the record are maintained on a dedicated blockchain infrastructure, based on the open-source Hyperledger Besu platform deployed as a permissioned network (basically, a system of record from which anyone can read but only authorised accounts can write to).
Online trading is managed by the T&M (Trading and Monetisation) platform module, that is also deeply intertwined with the FAME blockchain infrastructure. T&M enables online transactions, tokenisation of assets and access rights, payments, procurement and redemption of payment tokens, and other baseline functions that form the Marketplace as we know it.
The GOV (Operational Governance) module implements all the administrative features of the platform, in particular those that involve the registration of members (organisations), users (individuals) and trading accounts (blockchain accounts owned by users).
AAI (Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure) is the bridge between the SSI world and the Marketplace. A discussion of how SSI are leveraged in FAME is beyond our scope here. Suffice to say, AAI is in charge of securing access to the Marketplace Open API and website, ensuring that only authorised users are let through, but at the same time shielding the platform from the burden of identity management and personal data protection.
Finally, Marketplace’s website is an interactive front-end for end users to navigate it with desktop or mobile browsers. By leveraging the Open API backend, it supports all the key use cases for both asset providers and consumers: assets can be published, searched, and browsed, and access to digital content and services can be purchased.
These are just the main subsystems. There are many more that cover specific functional areas of the Marketplace. For example, there is a dedicated web application (FFGA) for onboarding new members, and tools for asset publishers that want to define non-standard access policies (APM) or receive advice on the price tag of commercial offerings (PAT).
Q4: What are the next priorities at the moment?
There are indeed some areas of improvement that we are already targeting. The top concern is populating the Marketplace catalogue with quality assets, because the success of the FAME initiative is conditioned – like that of most startups in the digital economy – by the achievement of critical mass in a virtuous market cycle: data or service consumers are more likely to use the system if they can find what they need, while providers will make their products available on our platform if they can reach a wide audience, and thus have a good ROI.
Then, we surely need to expand the administrative functionalities of the platform, which are currently quite primitive. We want to automate many aspects of day-to-day governance and make complex tasks – like, for instance, the offboarding of members and users – as simple as possible. Ease of use is, in our view, an important success factor.
Finally, it would be nice to have a FAME-dedicated SSI Wallet mobile app. At this time, our users must install the Sphereon app to access the Marketplace’s website. It is free and works quite fine, but we think that branding and tighter integration would be beneficial. However, this is not a big priority.
Authors: Nelia Zinatullina (eco Association of the Internet Industry) Mauro Isaja (Engineering Group)
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