Vegvisir: A Partition-Tolerant Blockchain for the Internet-of-Things

Abstract

While the intersection of blockchains and the Internet of Things (IoT) have received considerable research interest lately, Nakamoto-style blockchains possess a number of qualities that make them poorly suited for many IoT scenarios. Specifically, they require high network connectivity and are power-intensive. This is a drawback in IoT environments where battery-constrained nodes form an unreliable ad hoc network such as in digital agriculture. In this paper we present Vegvisir, a partition-tolerant blockchain for use in power-constrained IoT environments with limited network connectivity. It is a permissioned, directed acyclic graph (DAG)-structured blockchain that can be used to create a shared, tamperproof data repository that keeps track of data provenance. We discuss the use cases, architecture, and challenges of such a blockchain.