November 13, 2021 22:4 0218-348X 2150273

OPEN ACCESS
Fractals, Vol. 29, No. 7 (2021) 2150273 (11 pages)

c The Author(s)
DOI: 10.1142/S0218348X2150273X
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DECENTRALIZED DONATION EXPERT

SYSTEM TO BRING DOWN COVID-19
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RICARDO CARREÑO AGUILERA,∗,‡ MIGUEL PATIÑO ORTIZ,†

JULIAN PATIÑO ORTIZ† and ERICK VELAZQUEZ LOZADA†
∗Universidad del Istmo

Ciudad Universitaria S/N, Barrio Santa Cruz

4a. Sección Sto. Domingo Tehuantepec
C.P. 70760, Oaxaca, Mexico
†Instituto Politécnico Nacional

Sección de Estudios de Posgrado e Investigación —

ESIME Zacatenco (SEPI ESIMEZ )
Av. Luis Enrique Erro S/N, Unidad Profesional
Adolfo López Mateos, Zacatenco
Alcaldı́a Gustavo A. Madero
C.P. 07738, Ciudad de México, Mexico
‡ricardo.carreno.a@hotmail.com

Received September 1, 2021

Accepted September 27, 2021
Published October 25, 2021

Abstract
Due to the exponential growth in the use of systems with applications of blockchain technology,
this paper develops a funding system, with donations and offers of shares, through the Ethereum
platform with blockchain technology. Given the benefits that blockchain provides data protec-
tion and has high security, this paper offers a decentralized donation expert system using smart
contracts that makes fully reliable donation systems to attract more funds to this urgent global

‡
Corresponding author.
This is an Open Access article published by World Scientific Publishing Company. It is distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY) License which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided
the original work is properly cited.

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health issue. Smart contracts provide faithful donations and meet the characteristics of being
versatile, accessible, and sustainable to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. This expert system
found the Merkle grid as an optimum method to work efficiently on the blockchain. The expert
system proved to be steady and efficient by using an essential test dataset. A reliable donation
system expects more donors and investors since a sustainable and reliable approach is always
a milestone. The primary purpose of developing this system is to attract donors to bring down
the COVID-19 pandemic by providing a faithful donation system.

Keywords: Smart Contract; Decentralized Donation Expert System; Merkle Grid.

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1. INTRODUCTION to support the COVID-19 pandemic using the

Ethereum blockchain platform. This system has a
In recent years, an exponential growth of systems
smart contract that meets the characteristics of
with applications of blockchain technology1–4 has
being reliable, versatile, accessible, and sustainable,
been observed due to its benefit in data protection.
and at the same time contributes to a documented
It is crucial for any database administrator that
study that serves as a reference for similar future
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their systems do not get hacked, no matter how ele-

mentary their information is. Also, when scaled to a
massive number of users, the integrity of databases
becomes more critical. Because of this, the use
of blockchain technology has become increasingly
attractive. This technology can be appealing to use
in any application. The difficulty to hack a database
in a smart contract5,6 means offering to potential
donors, investors, and initial developers the confi-
dence to donate, invest, and work with this expert
system.
The primary purpose is to develop an expert sys-
tem for donations7,8 and investors’ shares so that
those who see it as a good project invest by buying
the token of this application (DOCOVID), which
is developed on the Ethereum platform. Donations
can be made using FIAT money and cryptocurren-
cies (BTC and ETH) to combat the COVID-199–11
pandemic.
Donating goods or money is a common practice
among companies, nongovernmental organizations,
and individuals. As a token of solidarity, the donor
is appreciated and motivated with tax benefits.
Although several donation systems in today’s
market can assist us in fundraising, however, this is
an expert system designed ad-hoc for the COVID-
19 pandemic donations with BIoT (Blockchain
Internet of Things) and decentralized semantic12–14
browser; the impact of using the BIoT concept
is to send all data to the Internet cloud to form
a big data repository, and the impact of using
a semantic browser is to avoid saturation in the
blockchain ecosystem. The expert system is a dona-
tion system for fundraising via FIAT or tokens
works, given that the blockchain technology is not
yet in everyday use for this type of applications.
This study analyzes the impact of the Merkle
grid15–17 in the donation systems to bring down the
COVID-19 pandemic to meet the essential charac-
teristics for this type of system, i.e. being reliable,
versatile, accessible, sustainable, and efficient.
Smart contracts can be optimized correctly using
dynamic programming.18 The use of this logarithm
is essential when big data is used around the smart
contract. A steady analysis is also needed on smart
contracts to avoid saturation.
2. EXPERT SYSTEM DOCOVID
The expert system19–24 consists of five modules:
Human–Machine Interface, Cash Flow, Databases,
Blockchain Ecosystem, and Delivery of Resources
(see Fig. 1). Note that the smart contract interacts
with all modules except the interface. Therefore,
blockchain has two essential tasks: protect users’
data and protect resources, and ensure both cash
flow of the expert system and the delivery of the
resources.
As shown in Fig. 1, the blockchain ecosystem con-
sists of the following submodules: The BIoT uploads
to the DDB (decentralized database) the infor-
mation gathered by the mobiles about the users.
DDB has an analog function of the ledger of the
blockchain. When information is required from the
ledger, the semantic browser effectively searches for
this information to be sent out from the blockchain
ecosystem. The smart contract is the brain of the
whole blockchain ecosystem. The two main pillars

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Fig. 1 Expert system modular diagram.

Fig. 2 DOCOVID expert system data flowchart.

are the clauses of the DCF (decentralized cash flow)
subsystem and the delivery of resources subsystem.
In Fig. 2, it can be appreciated that smart con-
tract is the core and the most critical subsystem
of the whole expert system. The internal database
stores information strictly related to the blockchain
ecosystem. In this figure, we can see how DOCOVID
expert system data flows among the different mod-
ules. Note that blockchain does not manage all data
since it focuses on user data, resources data, and the
semantic browser helps blockchain for efficient data
searches.
Figure 3 shows the payment system, which has
to do with the decentralized cash flow and delivery
of resources subsystem.
The development of the software is carried
out using the incremental methodology. For the
first increment, the algorithms are designed and

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Fig. 3 Payment system of the DOCOVID expert system.

implemented in a smart contract. In the incremen-

tal methodology the advance increment is deployed
to perform tests and verify the correct functioning.
Protection of the application data is done by defin-
ing restrictions within the actions of the smart con-
tract so that users have only access to the data but
users cannot control data since the smart contract
is immutable. The expert system allows the user to
use the data without being able to make changes
to the original data, keeping the information secure
and at the same time allowing it to be shared if the
case. Once the previous process is completed, the
system interface will be developed, for which two
main aspects will be considered; build an interface
Fig. 4 Physical architecture.
that allows users to interact with the application in
a simple way, defining the output formats that the
interface is a bot in Python that links to Telegram
application will have, and connect the Web browser
for mobile devices or Android.
with the Ethereum blockchain so that the latter can
In Fig. 4, we can see several types of users access-
respond to the different requests that are made from
ing the mobile application (observers, analyzers,
the application.
investors, developers, and donors and beneficiaries).

2.1. Human–Machine Interface 2.2. Cash Flow Module

Module The Cash Flow module is responsible for the
The first generalized physical architecture is pre- logistics of the resources raised by donations and
sented for the mobile application solution. This resources raised by investment in the covitoken until

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Decentralized Donation Expert System to Bring Down COVID-19
they are delivered to their beneficiaries. These two
resources are collected through FIAT USD currency
or cryptocurrencies: BTC, ETH, and DOGE, which
are converted into covitokens, and when they are
delivered to their beneficiaries, they are converted
into dollars.
The covitokens are stored in an ad-hoc covitoken
wallet for this expert blockchain system.
Cash flow is protected by encrypted Ethereum
digital wallets on the MEW (MyEtherWallet) plat-
form and accessed with cold hardware devices, e.g.
Trezor or ledger, and controlled by the clauses
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established in the smart contract.
2.3. Databases Module
It comprises two databases: the internal database
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and the external one. The internal database con-
tains the user’s historical data (donations made)
and their personal data. All the information in
the internal database is sent to the blockchain
ecosystem to be encrypted and hosted on the
Ethereum blockchain and is a satellite of the exter-
nal database. All the information that reaches the
human interface is from the external database, and
all the information used by the blockchain goes
to the internal database. Therefore, the external
database is not encrypted, and it has nothing to do
with the blockchain ecosystem. Internal database
has the data to be encrypted when sent to the
blockchain platform to protect the following sensi-
tive data: user data, their donation amounts and the
number of covitokens, cash flow data, and necessary
Fig. 5 Smart contract structure.
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smart contract information to deliver resources to
the beneficiaries.
On the other hand, the external database inter-
acts with the entire expert system. These databases
are made with MySQL.
In Fig. 4, a decentralized database and a central-
ized database are shown. The decentralized ecosys-
tem contains the sensible user data and data from
the Internet of Things (IoT) system where the
mobile network is considered as sensors gathering
information to the cloud. The sensors themselves
are devices that generate data, being connected
to the Internet. Therefore, all the data stored by
mobile devices connected to the Internet can be
considered under IoT. If the data is stored on the
blockchain, then it is a BIoT. In this case, a BIoT
subsystem can use a semantic browser to find data
efficiently saved on the blockchain.
Since the decentralized ecosystem only stores sen-
sible data, a centralized database must store the
regular data and interact with the human interface.
All these data flow efficiently with an auxiliary
semantic browser.
2.4. Smart Contract
Smart contract25–27 was coded with Solidity,28
which is a high-level smart contract-oriented pro-
gramming language for writing the smart contract
clauses; in Fig. 5, the structure of the smart con-
tract code is shown.
The blockchain ecosystem contains a smart con-
tract managing the resources to be delivered to the
beneficiaries.
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Fig. 6 Blockchain validation.

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The smart contract is immutable and lives on

a system that is not controlled by either party or
its agents. It executes an automatic contract that
functions as an if–then statement of any other com-
puter program, with the difference that it is done in
a way that interacts with real assets. When a pre-
programmed condition is triggered, not subject to
human valuation, the smart contract executes the
corresponding contractual clause.
The conditional structure (clauses) of the smart
contract is focused on the payment system to define
the beneficiaries of the donations: COVID research,
vaccine purchase, support to positive cases, support
to COVID hospitals, and support to deaths starting
from the wallets to the FIAT accounts depending
on the beneficiary. To optimize the efficiency of the
smart contract, the critical path process is deter-
mined (see Fig. 7).
Figure 6 shows the blockchain validation doing
a COVITOK transaction. The smart contract was
done in the Ethereum platform coding in Solidity
with Ganache Truffle and MyEtherWallet.
Figure 7 shows a decision tree using the TSP
(traveling salesman problem) algorithm to analyze
every possible route between nodes in the smart
contract algorithm. Therefore, the smart contract
can be optimized using dynamic programming.
Consider the following computing process between
nodes to find the optimal path: For the subset of
nodes s ⊆ {1, 2, . . . , n} and j ∈ s, let C(s, j) be the
length of the shortest path visiting each node in s
exactly once, starting at 1 and ending at j. When
|s| > 1, define C(s, 1) = ∞ since the path can-
not start and end at 1. Now, let us express C(s, j)
Fig. 7 Smart contract algorithm graph.
in terms of smaller subproblems. We need to start
at 1 and end at j. It has to be some i ∈ s so
that the overall path length is the distance from
1 to i, namely, C(s − {j}, i), plus the length of
the final edge, dij ; we must pick the best i such
that
C(s, j) = min C(s − {j}, i) + dij ,
where j ∈ s : i = j, (1)
where D = (dij ) is the matrix of the internodes pro-
cess amount; there are (n − 1)! possibilities starting
from node 1 and ending up at node 1. In Table 1,
we can see the processing costs from each node
to the next node to find the optimal path using
dynamic programming. In Fig. 7, it can be seen
that the smart contract computing process can be
set in five nodes or stages with the related process
cost for each possible route. These process costs are
deployed in Table 1.
In Fig. 8, it can be seen the resulting lowest risk
path and the critical path after using dynamic pro-
gramming in the smart contract algorithm.

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Table 1 Processing Costs for the Smart Contract

Graph.

Node Node Description Processing Precedent(s)

ID Cost

A ICO initial coin offer — —

(55% founders,
30% developers,
and 15% investors)
B Research 18 A
C Vaccine purchase 17 A
D Positive cases 14 C, B
support
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E Hospital’s support 15 C, B
F Funeral expenses 12 C, B Fig. 10 Blockchain node scheme data.
G Data encryption 13 D, E, F
H User history 15 G
I Information register 14 G the blockchain ecosystem, and the ledger is the
J Semantic browser 17 H, I interface between the centralized and decentralized
search ecosystems.
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3.1. Optimizing Blockchain using

Fig. 8 Lowest risk and critical paths for the smart contract
optimization.
Fig. 9 Benefits delivery code for founders.
2.5. Delivery of Resources Module
This module ensures to deliver profits or donations
properly. An example of the code for delivering prof-
its is in Fig. 9.
3. BLOCKCHAIN
DEVELOPMENT
Figure 10 shows the blockchain system in dashed
lines, where the smart contract is the brain of
Extended Merkle Grid
Merkle trees are used to summarize and verify large
amounts of donation system data without down-
loading all the data. Merkle trees are among the
most widely used methods for verifying blockchain
data due to their characteristics of efficiency, speed,
ease of programming, and security. However, they
are popular by the great benefits offered by their
characteristics. In this case, they can also be used
to verify the incorruptibility in the copy or backup
of large amounts of information or the transfer of
large amounts of data.
Building a binary Merkle tree for a file that con-
tains N = 2n blocks requires 2N − 1 hashes and
one digital signature. In comparison, identifying a
single nonconforming block is a relatively inexpen-
sive operation as it only requires 2 log2 N = 2n
comparisons.
Figure 11 shows the Merkle trees architecture,
which has four levels: root, branches, leaves, and
blocks. The root hash contains the signature. How-
ever, an extended Merkle grid, which is a variant,
has been found more efficient than the Merkle trees.
In this case, the extended Merkle grid (a variant
of Merkle tree) is used with significant impact on
donation systems since an extended Merkle grid
provides reliance to the donors and legal entities on
the integrity of the system. For optimization pur-
poses, it is intended to analyze the impact of the
usage of Merkle grid in a decentralized system for
bringing down the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Fig. 11 Merkle trees general architecture.
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Fig. 12 Blockchain optimization with extended Merkle
grid.
Figures 12 shows how an extended Merkle grid
gets the blocks aligned in a grid (in a square struc-
ture), this reduces the cost a lot compared to
the traditional Merkle tree (see Table 2). In the
extended Merkle grid, basically, it could be a case
with nonconforming blocks in the same row or col-
umn (see Fig. 13), or a case with nonconforming
blocks in different rows or columns.
While basic Merkle grids (Fig. 12) require up
to 50% fewer hashes and occupy up to 50% less
space than the Merkle grids, their search perfor-√
mance is much less impressive as they require 2 N
hash comparisons to locate a nonconforming block.
In contrast, Merkle trees only require 2 log2 N com-
parisons. A simple but effective way to reduce this
number of hash comparisons is to add two auxiliary
Merkle trees to the grid. As Fig.
√ 12 shows, the first
of the two trees is built upon
√ N row hashes, while
the second is built upon N column hashes. As a
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√
result, both trees together count for 2 N −1√nodes,
and the Merkle grid now has a√total of N +4 N −1
hashes, i.e. N block hashes, 2 N − 1 hashes in each
auxiliary Merkle tree, and a single signed hash of
the concatenated roots of these two trees. Even so,
the completed Merkle grid occupies up to 50% less
space than a comparable Merkle tree as
 √ 
N +4 N −1
lim = 0.5. (2)
n→∞ 2N − 1
The main advantage is that the number of
comparisons required√to identify a nonconforming
block becomes 4 log 2 N + 1, which simplifies into
2 log 2N + 1, i.e. one more comparison than with a
Merkle tree.
The probability of the two peccant blocks being
in two different halves is
(2n−1 )2
p1,1 = 2n  , (3)
2
which is, of course, almost equal to 0.5.
The case of three nonconforming blocks (see
Fig. 13) was used in this study to test the expanded
Merkle grid’s efficiency successfully.
We now calculate the cost of an extended Merkle
grid with 2m × 2m = 22m objects.
For two noncompliant blocks, we use the same
four case distinctions as before. In case 1, the two
nonconforming objects share a row or a column, and
no other hashes from the grid are required. The non-
conformance requires accessing 4m hashes in one
Merkle tree and
 
1
am = 2 + 2 m − 4. (4)
2m − 1
Table 2 shows clearly that the best effi-
ciency (lowest cost of 48) is obtained with the
extended Merkle grid, which is a normalized pro-
cess measurement.
Fig. 13 Three nonconforming blocks in the same sublevel.
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Table 2 Merkle Methods Cost Comparative Table. 4. CONCLUSIONS

Cost Binary Basic Extended The creation of COVITOK token is implemented
Tree Grid Grid by the smart contract. Tokens can be generated,
but only the person who created the contract will
No. of hashes 312 230 198
Authenticating all 100% 100% 100% be enabled to do so. What is more, anyone can send
objects coins to others without registering with a username
Efficiency cost 87 75 48 and a password.
locating three The development of this work is a contribution
nonconforming blocks made within the area of applications of smart con-
tracts. The results were obtained from designing
and creating a smart contract that allows managing
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clauses for cash flow and delivery of resources.

A decentralized expert system (DES) is built to
manage a large degree of reliability in a donation
and funding system. The work done by this DES
has excellent utility since it allows to automate and
give integrity with the smart contract.
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Experimental tests were carried out to deter-

Fig. 14 Stochastic dynamic process stability for total
unassessed transactions.
Blockchain stability study. The stability29–32
of these transactions performed with the token
named “DOCOVID” must be ensured, so a study
is performed on the dynamic stability of the total
number of unassisted transactions [X(t)] of the
stochastic33,34 process, where X(t) must be more or
less a constant to avoid leaving transactions unas-
sisted behind, and process X(t) must meet the limit
of positive recurrence, and the processing of incom-
ing transactions must be modeled by a Poisson
point process with λ as the rate of this process and h
as the average transaction time. If we take ECW as
the expected cumulative weight, it is defined accord-
ing to Eq. (1) as follows:
d/dt(t) = ((λk(t − h))/Xo )(2 − (t − h)/Xo ).
By Eq. (5), we have the graph in Fig. 14.
In Fig. 14, we can see that the total number
of unapproved transactions remains constant over
time, which means that the total number of unap-
proved transactions tends to a limit such that they
will never become approved transactions without
proper approval for an indeterminate amount of
time.
mine the functionality of the smart contract, with
different numbers of users and having innovative
tools such as the semantic search engine and a
BIoT blockchain. We find that if 23,000 users are
exceeded, it prevents the DES from being satu-
rated. These 23,000 users are at the prototype level.
DES behavior beyond this quantity of users was not
tested, but the DES is designed to be scalable. The
best performance is achieved from 7 tps (transac-
tions per second) to 14 tps. In addition, for this case,
the time of the transactions is unimportant since
only a vector of characteristics is defined. From this,
the prototype is made, resulting in a small set that
does not represent a high computational cost.
This study proposes a DES for donations with a
high degree of trust to manage electronic transac-
tions. It began with creating the COVITOK, which
allows a firm control of the property, and prevention
of double-spending was tested with a peer-to-peer
network using proof-of-work to make a public record
of transactions that quickly becomes unfeasible to
change for an attacker if honest nodes control most
CPU power. Extended Merkle grids are proved in
this study to optimize the blockchain.
(5) The network is robust given its unstructured sim-
plicity. The nodes work all at once, requiring little
coordination.
5. DISCUSSION
Experimental tests were carried out to test the
decentralized network’s functionality with a sig-
nificant amount of information (1 TB), finding
that if this amount of information is exceeded,

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R. C. Aguilera et al.
the developed decentralized network must be
redesigned since it could cause change in its results.
However, this network serves as a starting point for
experimentation and is sufficient for the analysis of
this study, which is its primary objective.
Nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will,
accepting the proof-of-work chain as a proof of what
happened while they were away. They vote with
their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of
valid blocks by working on extending them and dis-
carding invalid blocks by refusing to work on them.
Any necessary rules and incentives can be applied
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with this consensus mechanism.
Most of the existing donation systems are not
in blockchain ecosystems,35 but this paper offers a
solution to give reliability to the donors that the
resource will get to the right destination without
a deviation of resources, that is why this paper is
Fractals 2021.29. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com
special, since it ensures this with a smart contract.
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