Value attribution through provenance tracking in blockchain networks

Abstract

Blockchain networks are trustless, enabling different organizations to come together and collaborate towards a business goal. Enterprise blockchain networks are permissioned, where participation in the network is by invitation and each participant has an identity to transact on the network. Typically the incentive for joining such a permissioned network, is the value gained in terms of ease of doing business with untrusted entities, a reduction in disputes, or greater visibility into the business process and associated data, to name a few. This also means that participation in the network is asymmetric, i.e., different participants bring different levels of value to the network and gain different value from the network. The purpose of this paper is to present a mechanism to track the value brought and gained by participants, by using fine grained provenance tracking in a decentralized manner leveraging blockchain. In addition, the fine-grained provenance tracking permits us to share the value back with the contributing organizations in a fair and decentralized manner, paving the way for new modes of value sharing, incentivization and monetization mechanisms for organizations participating in the blockchain ecosystem.