Abstract: Crowdsourcing refers to the utilization of collective intelligence to collect, process, infer, and determine a vast amount of useful information, holding significant potential in areas such as service ratings, surveys, voting, and the industrial Internet of Things. A crowdsourcing system involves three stakeholders: the platform, workers, and task requesters. Traditional crowdsourcing systems are incentive- incompatible, and due to a lack of trust, all data transmitted between requesters and workers requires a remote centralized platform to act as a credit intermediary, which implies issues such as network congestion and privacy breaches. To address these issues, this paper proposes a trust-based crowdsourcing incentive mechanism, encompassing a “reward-penalty” model for crowdsourcing workers, a commission mechanism between requesters and master nodes, and a smart contract solution for the prisoners dilemma of resource exchange among master nodes. This multi-party incentive mechanism is realized by constructing smart contracts on master nodes in an edge environment. A low-cost, real-time, and high-volume transaction channel is established through the off-chain transaction implementation of the lightning network, solving the trust issues and transaction efficiency problems between master nodes and workers. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed crowdsourcing incentive mechanism and its implementation approach is verified through multi-dimensional comparative simulation experiments.

Key words: blockchain, crowdsourcing, incentive mechanism, trust value