BitFund: A blockchain-based crowd funding platform for future smart and connected nation

Abstract

The rapid growth in information technology and related talent has let to a competition among the investors to look for the best available talent. Additionally, the diverse range of directions in technology, gives a lot of options to the applicants to choose from. In such a scenario, it is imperative to link the most appropriate investors and developers in a secure and cost optimal way. Blockchain technology helps in creating a decentralized network of users where the transactions are recorded in an open distributed ledger. These features of blockchain enable a transparent and cost-effective platform for different applications. Based on the need to an effective crowdfunding platform for developing smart nation and the inherent features of blockchain technology, we propose a global crowdfunding platform called BitFund. Investors and developers can act as different nodes of the network. The investors can request a specific project and they can give their initial bid value in terms of time, cost and maintenance required. Different developers can bid with different values of the same parameters to get the project ownership. A smart contract is deployed between the investors and the developers to reach an optimal solution for the investors. Multiple iterations of bidding are carried out between the developers until the optimal solution or equilibrium is reached. The experimental results show that the proposed model yields better results as compared to other generic algorithms for crowdfunding.