Implementing a Novel Approach to Timebanking: Challenges and Possible Solutions using Blockchain

Blockchain-enabled timebanking promotes community engagement and social interrelation among members by facilitating the exchange of skills and services, against which members are rewarded with time credits instead of traditional currency. These time credits can be exchanged with individuals, institutions, or service providers for skills, services, or goods. However, existing traditional timebanking systems face challenges related to trust and identity management, recording of transactions, transparency in the distribution of rewards, operational and maintenance cost, scalability, matching and grading mechanism for services offering/offered, and, importantly, data security due to existing centralized nature and trust-less environment. This study proposes proof of concept for a novel application developed through a rigorous process of system design and testing. This paper reviews and presents the study of current timebanking applications and their limitations, conducted through a comprehensive literature review and analysis of existing systems. This study investigates whether leveraging blockchain technology in these applications can address these limitations and improve overall functionality by enhancing efficiency, transparency, and trust in the exchange of services. The findings offer insight into the challenges of implementing blockchain-based applications. It emphasizes the need to focus on challenges faced while implementing blockchain technology: computational overhead, the complexity of cryptographic computations, system and bandwidth capacity, throughput, latency, resource consumption, transaction cost, etc.