DARTIC: Decentralized Anonymous Reputation at Scale for Trustworthy Crowdsourcing

TL;DR

DARTIC is a decentralized framework that ensures anonymous, scalable, and trustworthy reputation management for on-chain crowdsourcing using zkSNARKs and dual-ledger systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel dual-ledger system with cryptographic proofs to achieve unlinkability, reputation binding, and scalability in decentralized crowdsourcing.

Findings

Proof generation takes less than 3 seconds per user.

Aggregation reduces verification time from 8.7s to 0.96s for 1024 proofs.

Gas costs are reduced by over 100x using zk-batching.

Abstract

On-chain crowdsourcing leverages blockchain's decentralization, transparency, and tamper-resistance to build trustworthy and verifiable Web3 crowdsourced services. However, existing decentralized reputation frameworks do not reconcile anonymity, reputation binding, and scalability. This paper demonstrates how on-chain crowdsourcing can simultaneously achieve these requirements under a trust-minimized model. We introduce DARTIC, a decentralized, anonymous, and scalable reputation-driven framework for crowdsourcing. DARTIC presents a dual-ledger system that enables requesters and workers to use distinct pseudonyms across interactions, ensuring unlinkability while maintaining accountability. To mitigate Sybil and reputation-reset attacks, we employ zkSNARK-based set membership proofs, cryptographically binding all user pseudonyms to a single access token without revealing the linkage. For scalability, we investigate two aggregation techniques that compress multiple proofs into a single succinct proof to minimize verification overhead. In addition, we design an automated, privacy-preserving reputation model that dynamically evaluates contributions across diverse crowdsourcing contexts. To demonstrate practicality, we instantiate and assess DARTIC in both crowdsensing and federated learning scenarios. Experimental results show that (i) individual proof generation for token spending completes in less than 3s, (ii) aggregation reduces the verification time of 1024 proofs from 8.7s to 0.96s, and (iii) zk-batching lowers gas costs by more than 100x compared to a pure Layer-1 deployment. These results demonstrate that anonymity, robust reputation binding, and scalability can be jointly achieved in fully decentralized crowdsourcing systems.