Design and Development of a Crowdfunding Platform with Expert Validation for Startups

Abstract

Abstract Since the financial crisis of 2008, the focus on the mediums of funding has been shifted from the traditional ways to new ways that could have more robust mechanisms, and one of these modern ways is crowdfunding. Crowdfunding provided a vital and remarkable impact, linking project owners and people who want to pledge to them. Thus, it revolutionizes the funding process for startups and creative projects. However, persistent trust issues and information asymmetry between project creators and backers hinder their potential. These problems attracted researchers from both academia and the industry to resolve or at least mitigate the impact of them on the crowdfunding process. However, these mechanisms still don’t provide a robust and objective way to augment the level of trust needed or acceptable. One of such mechanisms is third-party endorsements, more specifically the adaptation of experts’ validation, which is applied through approval/rejection voting, which represents a less-expressible voting mechanism for the experts to evaluate projects based on