Testing a Token Data Marketplace

TruSet is building the foundation for communities to maintain critical reference data on their own.

From March through June, TruSet ran an Alpha program enabling users to crowdsource reference data about ERC20 token projects in a test environment on the public Ethereum Rinkeby testnet.

Trusted, accurate data is the foundation for all investment, consumer, trading, and portfolio management activity, for both the traditional finance industry and emerging token markets. TruSet is using blockchain technology to rethink how these information intensive industries collect and maintain the data that users need to execute business, evaluate products, manage assets, and unlock value.

In an effort to efficiently maintain higher quality data, TruSet is creating multi-sided marketplaces for users to collect, validate, publish, and commercialize business-critical data without the intervention of vendors or service providers. As a community-operated resource, TruSet ensures better quality and accuracy because validators of the data are actual market participants. By creating a foundational layer of trusted and machine-readable reference data, the TruSet community can establish a new, primary source of truth for industry ecosystems and create opportunities for innovation and efficiency in global markets.

TruSet Alpha Program Design

Back in March, we launched the TruSet Alpha program for ConsenSys employees, and in May, we opened the Alpha up to select external users. The Alpha offers a test marketplace for users to crowdsource critical reference data for real ERC20 tokens, enabling consumers and investors to analyze the utility and value of the tokens, make critical decisions on the use and trading of the tokens, and run analytics on their token holdings. Using a simplified version of TruSet’s proprietary token reference data model, the Alpha community has published information on over 50 public ERC20 tokens and collectively validated the accuracy of that data in order to reach communally agreed-upon records of data that are trusted and accurate.

TruSet Alpha users earn proprietary TruSet ERC20 tokens for successful publishing and validating activity, an incentive model that we will ultimately use for our future commercial product. For the Alpha, these tokens exist on the Rinkeby testnet and have no commercial value. They allow us to track user contributions during the Alpha.

Token Data Alpha Prizes and Metrics

We ran a prize contest for each round of the Alpha. These contests helped us experiment on how users respond to tangible rewards for their contributions to the TruSet data set. The prizes during the Alpha were of nominal value, but they helped us test how incentives in the system drove user behavior.

Key Learnings from the Alpha

The Alpha program has been critical in helping the TruSet team prove certain hypotheses around governance and game design and will inform our product design and development going forward. Some of our key takeaways include:

• Real rewards. The ability to earn rewards with tangible value is critical for sustaining users contributions to the TruSet data by publishing and validating token data records.
• Rebalance reward scheme. For token projects today, validating is nearly as much work as publishing a new record. We need to rebalance the reward scheme to better reward successful validators.
• Data record completeness. We need to link the reward amount for both publishers and validators to the completeness of the proposed token data record.
• Private voting. We need to implement private voting so users are confident that validation votes cannot be “me too” votes.

What’s Next

Thanks to the feedback and learnings from our Alpha, TruSet is now working hard to develop the next iteration of the project. Key advances in the next iteration will include:

• Expanded Token Data Model. An expanded and flexible Token Data Model covering multiple types of tokens and providing much more detail on tokens and token projects.
• Validate in sections. The ability to publish and validate a record in sections. This will enable participants who validate and publish complete records to earn more rewards. Additionally, by validating publications in sections, the community can maintain a proposal with validated sections, and reject inaccurate sections for correction and resubmission.
• Exporting data. Expanded API read access to allow users to export pre-validated and validated token record data.
• Private voting. Private voting to help ensure each vote is based on validators’ true beliefs of the proposal’s accuracy, not on how other validators have voted.

Visit truset.com to learn more about the problems and opportunities in reference data management in the cryptosphere and beyond. If you are interested in participating in the next iteration of our Alpha, please complete our Token Alpha User Registration. The token ecosystem needs your help to build a trusted, accurate data set.

Disclaimer: The views expressed by the author above do not necessarily represent the views of Consensys AG. ConsenSys is a decentralized community withConsenSys Media being a platform for members to freely express their diverse ideas and perspectives. To learn more about ConsenSys and Ethereum, please visit our website.