Non-Fungible Token Enhanced Blockchain-Based Online Social Network

Abstract

In the current digital landscape, almost everyone is on social media or various social media platforms. People use social media for a plethora of purposes, which include staying connected with friends and family, accessing information and updates about ongoing events, entertainment, networking with professionals, expressing themselves to a wide range of users, promoting businesses, joining online communities and engaging in various activities which has led to an increase in the consumption and usage of online social networks (OSN). One of the reasons for such a growth is their features such as ubiquitous access, on-demand service, friendship networks, user engagement strategies like recommendation engines, etc. However, there are various limitations to the current approach, such as the centralization of control, lack of data ownership, poor access control, fake news, bot accounts, censorship, digital rights management issues, etc. To address these limitations, a paradigm shift is necessary. This paper aims to develop a social media application where every post can be converted to a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) and be sold to earn money. Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is used as the decentralized storage. Algorithms for all the functionalities of the applications are given along with an algorithm for a reputation score for every user and their posts in social media are also proposed.

Keywords

• Online social network
• distributed social network
• blockchain
• non fungible tokens
• IPFS
• Ethereum