Architecture and Proof of Concept Design for Community Marketplace Using Blockchain Technology and Fuzzy Intelligence

In a traditional marketplace, a centralized system determines the price of each commodity. However, here is the caveat, this system can introduce monopoly and face a single point of failure. In a decentralized marketplace, members can decide the pricing based on consensus by considering the quality, delivery time, or the current demand for the said product in the market. Blockchain technology is a secure, decentralized, and distributed ledger used to manage transactions. The immutable ledger stores the encrypted transaction details. This paper proposes an architecture for a blockchain-enabled community marketplace featuring dynamic pricing. This paper also discusses the blockchain-powered kiosk platform embedded with sensors to identify the quality and quantity of the commodities. A fuzzy logic-based smart contract is developed to monitor these parameters and decide on the pricing of the products sold through the kiosk. A customer can view the price in real-time through a mobile application or the kiosk's user interface. The system processes a transaction only after the customer accepts the proposed price. The IOTA decentralized distributed ledger platform will retain the customer information, sensor data, dynamic pricing from the fuzzy logic system, and the transaction details. This paper discusses the following: system architecture of the marketplace platform, the network configuration of the test network, fuzzy logic-based dynamic pricing algorithms, and the mobile application developed for end-users to perform the transactions on the platform.