During the past few years, the blockchain technology has been deployed in a myriad of applications across various sectors, apart from the financial sector, emphasizing its role in promoting transparency and decentralization of management via utilization of public consensus mechanisms.

A recently published patent introduced a novel protocol, which has been named the “Chainset” protocol, that can totally transform the outsourcing and crowdsourcing businesses. The new blockchain based protocol allows any user to create a set, after paying a predefined bitcoin transaction fee, to which they can approve and reject submissions, along with any other user of the blockchain who is paid a certain fee for proposing, or adding submissions to the set. A client, who is authorized to access the blockchain, or a given Chainset server, which summarizes and analyzes the blockchain, as well as a distributed hashed object store, e.g. the bittorrent protocol, will be capable of reading a pre-approved set of document hashes and a pre-approved set of documents via the distributed hash store.

Does it sound difficult to understand? Well, maybe if you read the patent, it may sound easier, or let me try to simplify it to you. A user will create a new Chainset, after paying the fee, with a set for, let’s say moderation of a certain forum. The chainset will pay users who add submissions, i.e. moderated threads, after being checked by a preapproved set of document hashes that are stored in the chainset’s object store, e.g. grammatical mistakes, length…etc. The chainset will pay bitcoin to users whose submissions are approved. Even though the patent did not mention them, I think that the invention will rely on off-chain applications to be able to read and verify some chainset’s submissions, or else Chainset would occasionally consume an enormous amount of resources.

Possible Use Cases:

Chainset can be the decentralized alternative to many outsourcing, crowdsourcing and freelancing networks and this can save both outsourcers and freelancers billions of dollars each year spent on fees collected by third parties or intermediaries such as freelancing networks as Upwork.com, Peopleperhour.com. The patent introduced the following as possible use cases:

Moderation of forum content: Moderation of content generated by forum users can be a daunting task that usually requires manual review. Multiple online crowdsourcing services offer forum content moderation and pay contractors via multiple methods. A peer-to-peer blockchain system that would incentivize forum moderators for their work would decentralize P2P forum moderation efficiently.

Moderation of content of Academic Journals : Content that requires high efforts in its production and review, such as that of academic journals, would markedly benefit from the Chainset protocol, mainly via omitting of third party fees and limiting the amount of content submitted to the journal’s reviewers. Submitters would be properly incentivized via such system for their quality work.

Other proposed uses include distributed resource allocation, charitable giving and governance

Conclusion:

Chainset is a novel blockchain based protocol that can revolutionize the world of outsourcing and crowdsourcing. Via a peer-to-peer system that incentivizes contractors with bitcoin, Chainset can be used in forum content moderation, review of academic journal papers, distributed resource allocation and other applications that span across a myriad of sectors.