A Blockchain-based System for Online Consumer Reviews

Abstract

Today s online review systems (used largely by hospitality services, internet retailers, government services, etc.) are highly centralized and subject to tampering and manipulation. Implementing a decentralized, trustworthy, unbiased and transparent review system is a major challenge. In this paper, we present a solution that utilizes Ethereum Blockchain, Smart Contracts, and IPFS to provide a secure, transparent and trusted platform for an online review system with high integrity and resiliency. We discuss key aspects related to architectural design, interactions between system components, algorithms and logic flow. We also show how we implemented and tested the overall system functionalities. Furthermore, we provide vulnerability analysis of the smart contract code. The full smart contract code was made publicly available at Github.