A Decentralized Marketplace Application on the Ethereum Blockchain

Modern centralized online marketplaces such as eBay offer an alternative option for consumers to both sell and purchase goods with relative ease. However, drawbacks to these marketplaces include the platform's ability to block merchants at their own whim, the fees paid to the platform when listing a product and when selling a product, and the lack of privacy of users' data. In this paper, we propose an application that remedies all three of these drawbacks through use of the Ethereum blockchain platform. The application was developed using the Truffle development framework. The application's functions were contained within an Ethereum smart contract, which was then migrated to the Ethereum network. The user's input was read through a web interface and sent to the Ethereum network via the web3.js API. Statistics about the application were gathered on the Rinkeby test network. The application was shown to have an average transaction runtime of 3.8 seconds, and an average gas consumption of 4.6 wei. Contract creation times for the application were shown to be less than a second. A cost analysis of the application was then conducted. The gas consumption of the transactions needed to both buy and sell a product was converted into US dollars, and the gas cost of the application was then compared to the cost to use an online auction marketplace such as eBay as well as an in-person auction house such as Sotheby's. The results showed that selling on the application is cheaper than existing online options as well as existing in-person options. These tests showed that our application was successful in addressing the drawbacks of current auction marketplaces.