A strong data economy is emerging in Europe, where both large companies and SMEs acknowledge the fundamental value of Big Data to cause disruptive change in markets and business models . Nevertheless, the growth of the data economy is hampered by the lack of trusted, secure and ethical-driven personal data platforms and privacy-aware analytics methods capable of, on the one hand, securing the sharing of personal data and proprietary/commercial/industrial data and, on the other hand, of strictly and fairly defining how value can be captured, produced, released and cashed out for the benefit of all the stakeholders involved. Addressing this kind of concerns on privacy, ethics and IPR ownership over the DataVaults value chain is one of the cornerstones of the project. Its goal to set, sustain and mobilize an ever-growing ecosystem for personal data and insights sharing and for enhanced collaboration between stakeholders (data owners and data seekers) relies exactly on DataVaults personal data platform’s extra functionalities and methods for retaining data ownership, safeguarding security and privacy, notifying individuals of their risk exposure, as well as on securing value flow based on smart contract. DataVaults aims to deliver a framework and a platform that has personal data, coming from diverse sources in its centre and that defines secure, trusted and privacy preserving mechanisms allowing individuals to take ownership and control of their data and share them at will, through flexible data sharing and fair compensation schemes with other entities (companies or not). The overall approach will rejuvenate the personal data value chain, which could from now on be seen as a multi-sided and multi-tier ecosystem governed and regulated by smart contracts which safeguard personal data ownership, privacy and usage and attributes value to the ones who produce it.