WorkerRep: Building Trust on Crowdsourcing Platform Using Blockchain

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is a process where an individual or an organization utilizes the talent pool present over the Internet to accomplish their task(s). These platforms offer numerous advantages such as reduced cost, better quality, and lower task completion time. To execute tasks efficiently, with the worker pool available on the platform, task posters rely on the reputation managed and maintained by the platform. Usually, reputation management system works on ratings provided by the task posters. Such reputation systems are susceptible to several attacks as users or the platform owners, with malicious intents, can jeopardize the reputation system with fake reputations. A blockchain based approach for managing various crowdsourcing steps provides a promising direction to manage reputation system. We propose a crowdsourcing platform where each step of crowdsourcing process is managed as transactions in Blockchain. This helps in establishing better trust in the platform users and addresses various attacks which are possible on a centralized crowdsourcing platform. We have built the proposed platform on the Ethereum framework. Our system utilizes IOTA’s consensus mechanism which reduces the cost for task evaluation to almost zero. The cost incurred for complete cycle that is from posting task to updating reputation is $ 0.631. Where in the cost for task poster comes out to be $0.195 and for the worker its $ 0.436.