Bloomatch a Blockchain based Dating Application

• Toshendra Kumar Sharma
• August 22, 2018

So far we have discussed at length the various applications of blockchain technology in finance, banking, and logistics. But clearly, blockchain has a much broader use case as is evident from its use in food technology, fashion and now, even dating. Dating has evolved in many different shapes and forms over the years and the 21st century undoubtedly belongs to online dating. Tinder has an estimated 50 million registered users with over 10 million daily active users. A determined 26 million matches are made on Tinder every day. All this goes to show how big the online dating industry has become. It is expected to grow even faster in the coming years as more people get access to cell phones and become comfortable with the idea of meeting people online. But all this comes at the expense of the users who have to give up their data to use the service and often pay money to use premium features. Let’s take a deep dive into the use of blockchain technology for developing a dating platform and see what benefits it can offer compared to centralized services.

The Current Centralized Model

The most prominent dating applications like Tinder, OkCupid and others are centralized services that obfuscate a lot of the matchmaking process from the users. Tinder provides little information about matches and even less information about the metrics used to show potential matches. Users find it difficult to understand why they aren’t meeting meaningful matches through these platforms as they do not publicly show how matches are made. Tinder uses proprietary code to determine a user’s worth and uses that value to match that user with other users. Some of the more premium features like SuperLikes and Boost to increase one’s presence cost several hundred dollars every year. Additionally, these companies are privy to a lot of user data that they use to spy on their users.

 

By comparison, blockchain based bloomatch platform is a much fairer and decentralized system. Bloomatch uses a host of artificial intelligence features to improve matches. Instead of relying on just pictures for matches, it uses a wide variety of questions to assess a pair’s compatibility. But ultimately, what sets bloomatch apart is its transparency. Since it is a decentralized system, there is no centralized authority to spy on the users. All of the information shared on the platform is publicly available to be used by other users. This would allow users to see how they are rated and improve upon areas in their life that need improvement.

 

Another area where blockchains can improve the online dating experience is that of identity theft and extortion. Media is flush with news of Tinder and other social media platforms used to extort money from unsuspecting victims with some cases even ending in murder. The main cause of this is that these platforms have very lax security requirement making it easy to create fake profiles for illegal activities. Blockchains solve this issue by using public key cryptography. Similar to the digital signing of Bitcoin transactions, profiles can be verified using digital signatures that are impossible to forget. This would make for a much more safer experience.