A P2P File Sharing Market Based on Blockchain and IPFS with Dispute Resolution Mechanism

Abstract

Online merchandising plays an important role in internet users’ behavior. With the advent of Web3.0 and blockchain technologies, online markets can be adapted to these new changes. In traditional online markets, buying and selling are performed in a centralized manner, which, in addition to the problems of centralized systems, also brings the challenge of users’ trust. One of the challenges in online markets is maintaining the privacy and not revealing the exchanged file to unauthorized entities. Another challenge is to have a mechanism to detect fraud in the market. If the wrong file or key is sent by the seller, the fraud detection mechanism guaranties that the smart contract will be informed and the buyer will be refunded. On the other hand, the seller will be paid if a correct file and its corresponding key have been sent.Blockchain network is not suitable for file storing. Therefore, there are centralized or decentralized methods to store files in building a blockchain based file sharing market. In this work, we selected a distributed file system storage called IPFS (InterPlanetary File system). We integrated IPFS network with a suitable smart contract which is deployed on Ethereum blockchain. We provided a decentralized dispute resolution mechanism to resolve any dispute that happens between market users.