Why Blockchain? Blockchain transaction ID’s on every provider’s (survey panelists) submissions (data exchange) creates an environment of transparency never before delivered across the Market Research Industry. If you’re involved in Market Research and are interested in our blockchain technology we would love to connect with you. Shoot us an e-mail at info@insights.network.

Insights Network has launched INSTAR Blockchain which powers https://instars.com, one of the most unique blockchain technology use cases the world has ever seen. In this post, we explore how our blockchain market research network works from a technical perspective and how the technology improves the quality of data, reduces cost, fraud, and empowers the creators of data.

Below, we highlight a few of the most common problems with the traditional market research industry, which hasn’t innovated standard practices since the beginning of the Internet.

Problem: Low quality users. Unverified, fraudulent data. Traditional Panels simply allow user sign ups and self selection of demographic information which we refer to as profile values (Age, Gender, Income Level, Number of Kids, Pet owner, etc.). IP address detection is the backbone of determining if a consumer should be allowed to participate in a survey. In some cases, a method called “river sampling” is used to survey respondents in real time, in which anyone accessing a survey link begins to be screened with demographic questions and routed into a relevant survey (if there is one available). This leads to a poor user experience, which we discuss in another point in this blog post.

Solution: Verified blockchain accounts. Committed values are assigned as hashes to INSTAR blockchain accounts after undergoing verification. Insights Network Blockchain verified accounts are assigned hashes which allow the accounts to participate with smart contracts. Identities are verified by third party verification partners, and profile values are committed as indecipherable hashes, making it impossible to know what values are assigned to each user. We use our patent pending zero knowledge proof identity verification scheme that acts as a filter to ensure the verification partners can not follow the documents they are verifying to the blockchain. A full disclosure of our patent pending technology will be announced and detailed publicly before the end of 2019. Below you see the records of account verifications happening in real time and recorded on the blockchain. In this instance, the account “fbtiezh3sty4” has received verification credentials assigned to their account and posted as a “commit” to the INSTAR Blockchain.