Fully Decentralized Blockchain and Browser-Based Volunteer Computing Platform

Abstract

Volunteer computing allows individuals, who have access to computing resources that are currently idle, to allocate them to perform useful work. This paradigm has existed since a long time and is evolving by the day with the advent of novel approaches such as browser-based volunteer computing. But most of these solutions have a degree of centralization in their architecture and are prone to single point of failure issues, or require explicit trust in the entities that manage the network. This paper proposes the use of blockchain to eliminate these drawbacks of traditional volunteer computing platforms, at the same time preserving the ability to make the architecture entirely browser-based. The key focus of our proposal is on resilience. Resilience is achieved by making use of the decentralized storage system, InterPlanetary File System. Finally, we present a prototype implementation of our ideas. We evaluate our system by solving NP-problems using the prototype. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.