A Decentralized Marketplace Application based on Ethereum Smart Contract

Abstract

Centralized marketplaces run on a process where a single authority has control over all activity. They suffer from limitation such as- mandatory fees to be paid to the platform for listing and selling items, lack of privacy and control over account, improper transaction security and so on. This paper presents a decentralized application aiming to reduce these drawbacks using Ethereum blockchain. It was implemented using truffle evolvement framework with solidity language. Ethereum smart contracts contain all functions of this application. Client-side application was created through an API called web3.js. Analytical analyses of this application using Kovan test network show least transactional fees reported in literature till date. The application was shown to have average transaction fee of 0.1524472 (eth) with average run time of 3.5 seconds and average gas consumption of 4.6 gwei, these are the best results obtained till date for such system ensuring cost effectiveness and reducing time complexity. The contract making time was less than a second. Comparison with well-known centralized online marketplaces revealed that proposed system was more economical than current centralized online applications in terms of profit margin.