Decentralized Impact Tracking System for Community Support Program

Abstract

Community support programs may struggle with issues such as transparency, mismanagement of funds and visibility of transactions to the public. Centralized donation platforms may not offer immutable records and real-time traceability of financial contributions, which may result in a deficit of trust between donors and beneficiaries. This paper introduces a Decentralized Impact Tracking System for Community Support Programs which uses a custom-built blockchain architecture to provide transparent and tamper-resistant recording of funding activities. The system is based on three main roles, i.e., the beneficiary, the donor, and the administrator. Beneficiaries make funding requests that include details of the project, which are recorded in the form of transactions on the blockchain. Donors choose verified projects and send funds, creating blocks of new data that are linked up by a cryptographic process using a Secure Hash Algorithm 256. A simplified version of the Proof-of-Work mechanism is implemented to ensure that blocks are kept intact and can't be altered by anyone unauthorized to do so. The administrator validates and approves requests using a dashboard without making any changes to the immutable ledger. The system combines a web-based interface that has been developed with the use of the programming languages: Html, CSS, and Java Script, a backend which is provided by the open-source software: Flask and database supported authentication. The end result is a transparent audit trail in which all approved programs, transaction histories and funding progress are all available to the public. The proposed framework is an attempt to provide a structured and accountant model for decentralized donation tracking that can be deployed at the academic and prototype level.