DAO-TDS: Decentralized Autonomous Trusted Data Space for Global Data Circulation

Trusted Data Spaces (TDS) have emerged as the core infrastructure for secure, privacy-preserving data circulation across industries and jurisdictions. However, state-of-the-art TDS implementations suffer from centralized platform monopoly, rigid cross-border governance failure, unfair value distribution, and poor scalability for global-scale collaboration. This paper proposes DAO-TDS, a novel decentralized autonomous trusted data space paradigm that enables centerless, cryptography-governed, and value-closed-loop data circulation. We make three core contributions: (1) We formalize the first anti-monopoly, incentive-compatible game-theoretic model for distributed TDS governance, with rigorous provable security guarantees; (2) We design an original Proof of Data Contribution (PoDC) consensus mechanism and a post-quantum secure Crypto-DAO governance protocol, with formal security proofs under the Universal Composability (UC) framework; (3) We implement a full prototype of DAO-TDS and conduct comprehensive, reproducible evaluations, showing that it supports 10,000+ distributed nodes with >12,000 TPS and <2s 99th-percentile confirmation latency, while delivering >80% of generated value to data contributors (vs. <50% in centralized platforms). While the proposed paradigm demonstrates strong performance and security guarantees, it still faces challenges in adaptive cross-jurisdictional compliance and lightweight edge node deployment, which require further investigation.