SwarmAd: A decentralised content management system

Abstract

Online presence is becoming an important part of everyday's life and online communities may represent a significant source of engagement for the elderlies. Nevertheless, many may struggle to be online due to a lack of expertise, and a decentralised architecture may provide a solution by removing intermediaries, such as a webmaster, while not requiring expensive cloud solutions. However, issues concerning accessibility, security, and user experience have to be tackled. The paper focuses mainly on three issues: providing a human-readable domain, moderating content, and creating a reward system based on user reputation. An architecture is proposed based on Ethereum and Swarm. Smart contracts provide an automated set of rules to handle enterprise registration, content creation, and decision-making process, while Swarm serves both as distributed storage and the web host. Besides, in combination with Ethereum Name Service, Swarm provides a secure, distributed, and human-readable point of access to the web interface. The paper also describes an innovative two-token system where one token is meant to be a trustworthy reputation metre and the other is a spendable coin to get rewards. The final result is a fully decentralised, authenticated and moderated platform where users can aggregate and share their content presentations on the Internet.