Reliable, Fair and Decentralized Marketplace for Content Sharing Using Blockchain

Abstract: Content sharing platforms such as Youtube and Vimeo have promoted pay per view models for artists to monetize their content. Yet, artists remain at the mercy of centralized platforms that control content listing and advertisement, with little transparency and fairness in terms of number of views or revenue. On the other hand, consumers are distanced from the publishers and cannot authenticate originality of the content. In this paper, we develop a reliable and fair platform for content sharing without a central facilitator. The platform is built as a decentralized data storage layer to store and share content in a fault-tolerant manner, where the peers also participate in a blockchain network. The blockchain is used to manage content listings and as an auditable and fair marketplace transaction processor that automatically pays out the content creators and the storage facilitators using smart contracts. We demonstrate the system with the blockchain layer built on Hyperledger Fabric and the data layer built on Tahoe-LAFS,and show that our design is practical and scalable with low overheads.