A decentralized prediction market platform based on blockchain and masternode technologies

Prediction market can help to trade the outcome of events, which is very useful for risk hedging, especially when people are making business ventures. However, the traditional prediction market is centralized, which means the platform is completely controlled by just one person or team. This centralization has bad influence on the platform to obtaining trust from massive users. So it is important for the prediction market industry to decentralize the traditional platform into a decentralized one, and get its control from few person and give it back to a lot of people in the prediction market community. Blockchain is a very promising technology to make it true as it is a popular decentralizing technology. However, existing blockchain technologies like Bitcoin or Ethernum bring about new problems like high energy consumption, expensive fee, and very low system capacity, which is not suitable for the current prediction market. To solve these problems, we propose to combine masternode technology together with blockchain to serve as a decentralized node, and each masternode is deployed and running on an edge server in mobile edge network. The network of master-nodes serves together as the decentralized prediction market platform. As we know, it is not easy to run a masternode. So the number of masternodes is much less than the number of complete nodes of the blockchain. As a result, it is easier to reach the consensus among these masternodes. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that our proposed method is useful.