GuRuMarket: A guarantee & reputation-assisted framework for secure and efficient on-chain real-world service trading

Recent initiatives have explored leveraging on-chain trust management to enhance blockchain maintenance and scalability. However, few solutions have effectively addressed both off-chain trust among real-world participants and on-chain trust intrinsic to blockchain nodes simultaneously. This paper presents GuRuMarket, a blockchain-powered real-world marketplace. It combines on-chain and off-chain trust management to build a system adapted to real-world commodity requirements. Beyond the recording of online transactions, the platform takes a step further by facilitating the provision of off-chain services. A key aspect of GuRuMarket involves the development of a mathematical model for assessing the reliability of each participant, reinforced by an incentive mechanism based on reputation and guarantee. In addition to helping buyers select services from sellers, the trust model we propose enables trustworthy participants to set up nodes and join the system’s network, thus playing an active role in managing the entire marketplace. Lastly, the security of our blockchain is ensured via the proposed consensus protocol, called Guarantee&Reputation Byzantine Fault Tolerance (GuRuBFT) . GuRuBFT selects nodes based on a scoring formula that uses reputation and guarantee to achieve fairness. A thorough security analysis and a comprehensive performance evaluation validate the fairness, efficacy, and scalability of GuRuMarket.