Marketplace

The Portex Marketplace functions like a DEX, but for data. This is where price discovery takes place for listed Data Vaults using an auction mechanism.

Given the non-fungible nature of data, we will employ a Dutch Auction (descending price auction) in the first version of our data marketplace. Enterprise data sellers can optionally use a Reverse Auction to list any product they have validated PMF with clear pricing, such as reference rates. This is a massive UX improvement over the status quo, where data sellers servicing protocols have little to no say on how much their products are being sold for, as that is currently determined by oracle intermediaries.

This structure is also more favorable to data buyers as it enables DeFi protocols to engage in procurement, entirely onchain, by posting Request for Providers (RFPs) with their specific data requirements.

A key design goal of the marketplace is to offer Fair Data Exchange (FDE), a property that makes data exchanges atomic: the seller only gets paid if the buyer has access to the data, and the buyer only gets the data if they pay the seller. Smart contracts make these requirements indivisible as they function as escrows. Our implementation of FDE was inspired by the seminal paper Atomic and Fair Data Exchange via Blockchain (2024) by Ertem Nusret Tas, István András Seres, Yinuo Zhang, Márk Melczer, Mahimna Kelkar, Joseph Bonneau and Valeria Nikolaenko.

More details on our data marketplace are coming soon.