Nathan Blecharczyk, a co-founder at Airbnb, has outlined his interest in Blockchain technologies to help establish user reputation and trust in an interview with UK paper City AM.
Blecharczyk, Airbnb’s CTO said in the interview that Airbnb would be looking into Blockchain integration this year, or a similar distributed ledger system, to authenticate a user’s reputation and establish trust on the platform.
“I think that, within the context of Airbnb, your reputation is everything, and I can see it being even more so in the future, whereby you might need a certain reputation order to have access to certain types of homes. But then the question is whether there’s a way to export that and allow access elsewhere to help other sharing economy models really flourish. We’re looking for all different kinds of signals to tell us whether someone is reputable, and I could certainly see some of these more novel types of signals being plugged into our engine.”
At the moment, Airbnb calculates reputation via a combination of ID checks and social media verification and users have a ‘Trust and Verification’ tab attached to their accounts.
