Towards event-driven decentralized marketplaces on the blockchain

Abstract

Blockchains have become a popular technology for lowering the trust-tax burden between transacting parties that cannot necessarily trust each other. They are used as substitutes for the centralized authorities typically incorporated in transactional workflows to perform verification tasks and have the advantage of being objective and incorruptible. For applications such as supply chain marketplaces, auxilliary functionalities beyond the core blockchain roles of recording and validating transactions such as event detection are important for enabling application participants be responsive to business conditions. Unfortunately, existing blockchain event frameworks are immature, syntactic, inflexible and not expressive enough for many application needs. In this paper, we propose an approach that involves an event model which "semantifies blockchain transactions" and an implementation architecture that integrates a open-source blockchain database BigChainDB with a semantic engine and publish-subscribe messaging platform. Finally, we model and simulate a use-case inspired from the manufacturing domain and present usability and preliminary performance results that demonstrate the discriminatory ability of semantics-enabled event model.