WorkerRep: building trust on crowdsourcing platform using blockchain

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is a process where an individual or an organization utilizes the talent pool presentover the Internet to accomplish their task(s). These platforms offer numerous advantages suchas 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 managedand maintained by the platform. Usually, reputation management system works on ratingsprovided by the task posters. Such reputation systems are susceptible tseveral attacks as usersor the platform owners, with malicious intents, can jeopardize the reputationsystem with fakereputations. A blockchain based approach for managing various crowdsourcing steps provides apromising direction to manage reputation system. We propose a crowdsourcing platform whereeach step of crowdsourcing process is managed as transactions in Blockchain. This helps inestablishing better trust in the platform users and addresses various attacks which are possibleon a centralized crowdsourcing platform. We have built the proposed platform on the Ethereumframework. Our system utilizes IOTA’s consensus mechanism which reduces the cost for taskevaluation to almost zero. The cost incurred for complete cycle that is from posting task toupdating reputation is $ 0.631. Where in the cost for task poster comes out to be $0.195 and forthe worker its $ 0.436