Marketplaces need to record, audit, provide availability, and non-repudiation for data involved in exchanges. The auditing tasks in these systems are typically performed by a Trusted Third-Party Auditor (TTPA) who is responsible for checking the integrity of the content, and thus for increasing stakeholders’ trust in data exchanges. It is a centralized model where all the power and responsibility fall on the TTPA, which is a single point of failure and cannot be disputed by users. Decentralized architectures and protocols appear as an alternative to avoid those risks while providing the same quality of service (QoS).

The challenges of designing a feasible storage auditing framework emanate from the security challenges of decentralized solutions and the performance overhead due to on-chain operations. In this context, the previous work presents a solution based on a Merkle hash tree for auditable accounting. Their approach is similar to ours and the project is also open-source. However, the implementation is made for the Bitcoin network while our project uses an Ethereum-based network built with the Hyperledger Besu client. In other works, polynomial commitment schemes are used to create succinct proofs of data possession and guarantee data availability. However, i3-MARKET’s Auditable Accounting system is faster and more scalable but with less complexity than the mentioned alternatives.