COMCHAIN

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Inspiration

The impact of social media on people’s daily lives becomes inevitable. The evolution of the social media platform strengthens the relationships among people who share similar interests. The people of the same or different interests through engaging with social media platforms refine their knowledge in versatile domains such as social science, information technology, banking, business, sports, education, finance, crowdsourcing, medical, health, political, and etc. The advent of smart technology into social media platforms has sparked interest among users to adopt the social media platform. With the growing scale of network participants in social media, confronting the credibility of the platform was identified as the huge challenge. So, to address this challenge we thought about a decentralized and truth based social media platform governed by the community itself.

What it does

The proposed social media platform, segregates on the basis of user interests. A community is made up of different groups of people with different interests. (Ex: technology, politics, movies, etc. Inside a community user can post relevant content according to the community rules. The content is divided into two parts, one is on-chain data, such as current reputation score (Prestige Points), content id (image id), user role. Other is off-chain data such as photos, videos etc. First, the content will be verified by a dedicated jury panel selected inside the community. After verification the on-chain data will be added to the verified node and the off-chain data will be moved into a decentralized storage network. Thereafter, this content will be visible for the community users. So, the users can give up-votes or down-votes until that particular user posts another content again. If the user posts another content the node will be named as mined node and moved into the master blockchain, and the current reputation score will be updated according to the last content. The off-chain data will be stored in decentralized storage network until a season ends. (Users can only convert their reputation score (Prestige Points) when a season ends. Also, a season is limited for 4 months). After the season ends all the data will be archived and moved into a cloud storage.

Reputation score (Ri)

Reputation score is a value attribute used to indicate the trust level of the particular node (Minor or Validator) in the network which is calculated by the total Prestige Points they have in their own profile. It is gained by the node's healthy behavior in the block creation and validation process. When the fraudulent activity is identified, the respective node will be penalized by deducting the Prestige Points from their profile. Thereby the respective node will lose its reputation score.

Stakeholders

Minor - The minor is the node who is willing to share the news as a transaction block. If the node has reputation score more than the mining threshold (MT) will be allowed to participate in the mining process. Minors sign their transaction as a transaction block and forward it for the validation process. If the transaction block is validated then, it will be shared in the public forum. If that transaction block appended successfully then the minor will receive a new reputation score (Prestige Points) as a reward which can be added with their wallet after a season ends. Validator - Validator should be a member of the consensus jury panel. Once the block is added successfully with the network, the validator may receive the rewards for the validation process. If a particular node is identified as a malicious actor by the jury panel that node will be expelled from the jury panel immediately and penalized. To help the validation process there are oracles as well.

Consensus jury panel selection

In each community the pre-authorized members are chosen from the network from the basis of their reputation score. The reputation score is dynamic according to the node's data behavior. Therefore, we split the timeframe into epochs to select the reputed people to engage in the validation process. In each epoch, those who have their reputation score higher than the Network Truth Threshold (NTt), will be selected as a trusted member(jury member) to participate in the validation process to establish the truthfulness in the respective community.

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Incentive mechanism

Every miner and validator is equipped with a Prestige Points wallet. When a miner joins the network, it cannot immediately begin signing transaction blocks. A sufficient quantity of points should be available for a miner to add a transaction block to the consensus process. Furthermore, miners will not be able to add a transaction block if the miner does not have enough points (because for the oracle services, Validation, and data storing minor need to spend Prestige points). Jury checks the block after it has been added to the consensus process. If it contains malicious data, points from the minor's wallet will be deducted, and will be added to the jury's wallet. Furthermore, malicious minors can be banned form the community. When a block is verified by the jury, it is added to the verified blockchain, and points are added to the wallets of both miners and the jury. If the number of upvotes exceeds the number of downvotes once the block is published to the blockchain, points will be added to the miner. If the downvotes outnumber the upvotes, the miner will be penalized with points. After each season end (these seasons are pre-defined) user can exchange points into virtual coins.

How we built it

To build the front end, we have used React framework. Proposed oracle services will be powered by Chainlink and Chainlink Keepers. Authentication, wallet addresses management, role management will be powered by Moralis platform. Community management will be powered by Polygon because for that we need higher scalability and multichain support. And the decentralized storage network will be powered by Filecoin. Finally archived data will be stored in Google Cloud.

Challenges we ran into

The project is still in the brainstorming phase. So, gathering ideas and combine them and get a meaningful overall picture was very much challenging to us. when considering coding part, we did experiments, how new sponsor technologies works etc. But we were not very experienced with those technologies because we are fairly new to the blockchain development world

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Even though we could not complete the project, we wanted to submit it because we have learned lots of new technologies because of this project. So we can be proud ourselves as we have did something unique and exciting.

What we learned

Technology wise we have learned about new peer to peer storage systems, multi chain management systems, oracles, etc. And most importantly we have learned how to manage time with everything because we are still undergraduates, doing final year research and still join into a hackathon and give it a try.