Group Activity Matching with Blockchain Backed Credible Commitment

Abstract

Humans are social creatures which enjoy participating in group activities. Existing platforms such as event-based social networks and social-matching applications empower people to organize and participate in different kinds of interest-based activities. However, credibility issues are inevitable since the participants’ commitment to participate in activities on time can hardly be guaranteed. As a result, many activities are canceled due to lack of participation, which impairs people’s will for attending activities and increases the difficulty of coalescing activity groups. In this work, we propose an approach, called BC-GAM, for matching group activities with blockchain backed credible commitment. Based on a formalization of the matching problem, BC-GAM works as follows. During user requesting (for certain type of activity), the user is required to pay a variable deposit which reflects his/her level of commitment for participating in the activity. Our matching algorithm then automatically coalesces the users according to the user requests and availability of facilities. Our algorithm is designed to maximally allow the enrolled users to participate in activities based on their commitment. Furthermore, BC-GAM utilizes blockchain techniques and smart contracts so that the user requesting, commitment and participation are automatically executed in a distributed and trusted way. We implemented BC-GAM on a hyperledger and developed a user interface for requesting and inquiry of the activities. Based on the blockchain platform, we performed experiments with not only simulated data but also actual user studies. The experiment results show that the matching algorithm is effective and efficient, and BC-GAM can be potentially applied in practice.