BlockPlace: A Novel Blockchain-based Physical Marketplace System

The emergence of marketplaces, such as Airbnb, Uber, and Facebook-Marketplace, enables significant restructuring of economic activities by facilitating transactions between independent supply and demand-side parties. However, in a traditional marketplace, gaining customers’ trust remains a persistent obstacle as it does not provide any purchase protection for buyers or sellers, needs more potential product verification, and relies upon third parties for the secure transference of products. Therefore, blockchain marketplaces are a new paradigm of peer-to-peer systems that eliminate the need for intermediaries by leveraging the transparency and trustworthiness of distributed ledger technology. However, all the Blockchain-based existing marketplaces, such as Origami and OpenSea, only provide support for digital products. Hence, this paper presents BlockPlace, a blockchain-based marketplace framework that supports both digital and physical products. IoT devices that serve as gateways between buyers and sellers ensure the authenticity of the products and increase security in the transference of goods. In addition, lockers rely upon the security of blockchain technology. We provide a detailed operational model for token generation, data management, governance, and our reputation system to illustrate that designing such a physical marketplace is sound, safe, and viable.