A paper from the National Technical University of Athens, written as part of the Bloomen project.
Authors: Georgios Palaiokrassas, Antonios Litke, Georgios Fragkos, Vasileios Papaefthymiou, Theodora Varvarigou1
Abstract. In this paper, we demonstrate the multiple points of innovation when
combining multimedia content with blockchain technology. As of today, content
creators (authors, photographers, radio and video reporters, data visualizers etc.)
are publishing and sharing content (articles, photos, audio, video and combina-
tions) on media/social networks but without the effective control over who is
going to reuse this content. To this direction, we introduce a blockchain based
service which successfully blends different technologies to provide more trans
parency on how the content is further tracked, promote openness, trust and secu-
rity between participants, allow direct monetization for the content creator and
expose the benefits of using blockchain technology as: a database of multimedia
content, a novel payment method while using a dedicated created cryptocurrency,
an insurance of proof of ownership through the exploitation of smart contracts
running on Ethereum blockchain platform and a means to implement new solu-
tions to value content based on quality. Additionally, by integrating Hyperledger
Projects (Fabric, Composer, Explorer), we examine how their functionalities
such as private and permissioned blockchain improve our system. Highlighting
the importance of applications exploiting blockchain technology to efficiently
support, store and retrieve data we utilized, integrated with blockchain and com-
pared different solutions among which InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and tra-
ditional databases such as MongoDB with GridFS tool.
