Trustless Intermediation in Blockchain-Based Decentralized Service Marketplaces

Service marketplaces promise an open platform for sellers and buyers of IT services. The marketplace design usually assumes that market functions, such as match-making, transaction settlement, and dispute resolution are performed by intermediaries in a centralized system. We propose the concept of trustless intermediation to enable new forms of decentralized service marketplaces. By leveraging blockchain-enabled smart contracts we eliminate the need for trust in marketplace intermediaries and reduce barriers of entry, lock-in, and transaction costs, by removing now obsolete trust-establishing mechanisms. Desema, our decentralized service marketplace prototype, is a first implementation of this concept that is based on the Ethereum blockchain in combination with IPFS, a peer-to-peer distributed file system.