Designing a Trustworthy and Secured House Rental System using Blockchain and Smart Contracts

Abstract

The traditional process of renting the house has several issues such as data security, immutability, less trust and high cost due to the involvement of third party, fraudulent agreement, payment delay and ambiguous contracts. To address these challenges, a blockchain with smart contracts can be an effective solution. This paper leverages the vital features of blockchain and smart contract for designing a trustworthy and secured house rental system. The proposed system involves off-chain and on-chain transactions on hyperledger blockchain. Off-chain transaction includes the rental contract creation between tenant and landlord based on their mutual agreement. On-chain transactions include the deposit and rent payment, digital key generation and contract dissolution, by considering the agreed terms and conditions in the contract. The functional and performance analysis of the proposed system is carried out by applying the different test cases. The proposed system fulfills the requirements of house rental process with high throughput (>92 tps) and affordable latency (<0.7 seconds).