Jens Hunhevicz, Hongyang Wang, Lukas Hess, Daniel Hall
We introduce our ongoing research on no1s1 (“no-ones-one”), a meditation pod that aims to be the first autonomous space. To frame our early thinking, we conceptualize what we call Decentralized Autonomous Space (DAS) as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) linked to a physical location. DAOs leverage a combination of Decentralized Ledger Technology (DLT) and the Internet of Things (IoT) to create self-governing coordination mechanisms through smart contracts. Therefore, DAS can self-create and self-manage, and ultimately self-own. DAS is presented as a potentially disruptive paradigm of future housing and infrastructure with wide-ranging implications to the built environment.
An energy trading system is essential for the successful integration of Electric Vehicles (EVs) into the smart grid. In this paper, leveraging blockchain technology, we first propose a privacy-preserving charging-station-to-vehicle (CS2V) energy trading scheme. The CS2V scheme is useful in crowded cities where there is a need for a charging infrastructure that can charge many EVs daily. We also propose a privacy-preserving vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) energy trading scheme. The V2V scheme is useful when charging stations are not available or far and cheaper prices can be offered from EVs, e.g., if they charge from renewable energy sources. In the V2V scheme, the privacy of both charging and discharging EVs including location, time, and amount of power are preserved. To preserve privacy in both schemes, EVs are anonymous, however, a malicious EV may abuse the anonymity to launch Sybil attacks by pretending as multiple non-exiting EVs to launch powerful attacks such as Denial of Service (DoS) by submitting multiple reservations/offers without committing to them, to prevent other EVs from charging and make the trading system unreliable. To thwart the Sybil attacks, we use a common prefix linkable anonymous authentication scheme, so that if an EV submits multiple reservations/offers at the same timeslot, the blockchain can identify such submissions. To further protect the privacy of EV drivers, we introduce an anonymous and efficient blockchain-based payment system that cannot link individual drivers to specific charging locations. Our experimental results indicate that our schemes are secure and privacy-preserving with low communication and computation overheads.
Blockchain is predicted to disrupt industries, economies, and societies. The properties of distributed ledgers allow the creation of immutable data structures that facilitate shared access in real time and enable a plethora of innovative applications. However, blockchain is not a uniform technology but rather a bundle of evolving components whose implications are notoriously hard to predict. At present, it is not clear how current trends will evolve, with technical evolution, legislation, and public policy being three contingency factors that make ongoing disruptive transformations particularly hard to predict. In light of blockchain’s potential disruptive impact, it is surprising that scenario analysis has hitherto been largely ignored in academic research. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce the technique, clarify several misconceptions, and provide examples illustrating how this method can help to overcome the limitations of existing technology impact research. We conclude that if applied correctly, scenario analysis represents the ideal tool to rigorously explore uncertain future developments and to create a comprehensive foundation for future research.
Blockchain is currently one of the fastest-growing technologies in the field of Computer Science. It has found a prevalent use in financial applications like cryptocurrency, for example, Bitcoin and Ethereum. They have been able to bring an unforeseen disruption in the field of finance. However, permissionless Blockchains like these have some downsides, namely the computation cost of the Proof of Work algorithm, maximum allowed size for a block, decrease in intelligibility with the increase of the number of blocks in the chain, domination of nodes with higher computing power as miners and validators. These factors have restricted the adoption of permissionless blockchain technology outside the field of finance, such as in medical or legal fields. This paper proposes a solution to these problems using a permissioned blockchain. It does not require a computationally expensive consensus mechanism as permissioned chains call for trust between participating organizations which is achieved via exclusive invitations. We have utilized a third-party orderer to maintain the trust between organizations.
Henderi Henderi, I Ketut Gunawan, Husni Teja Sukmana, Agung Yudo Ardianto
We propose another blockchain client displaying stage that can be utilized to share data without letting completely go and possession and apply it to the field of movement booking. Our new stage gives answers for different central points of interest: extraordinary information insurance and client the board, and shared motivating forces. Track the functioning techniques, objects, time, strategies and reasons for UN associations in an unquestionable way. Gather client profile data and empower clients to trade data with elective travel suppliers to get endowments dependent on protection inclinations determined in great agreements. Client information dependent on the storehouse will be changed over into an open information design and communicated by means of blockchain transmission. This permits the information to be effectively handled and utilized by different hubs. The keen agreement confirms and executes the concurred information. Terms of utilization and token exchange become free help to clients. Savvy agreements can give an assortment of stores to guarantee that all members act with honesty. This record additionally assesses the presentation of the new stage dependent on the investigation of holding up time and memory utilization by characterizing three test situations. The outcomes show that the hub can rapidly react to every one of our issues by utilizing the exchange port nonconcurrently.
There are two primary purposes of property registers. First, they make public the proprietary interests that exist in a piece of property (disclosure). Second, they provide confidence to the holders of proprietary interests that their rights will be enforceable against other parties and will take priority over lesser competing interests (assurance). However, disclosure and assurance are only useful to the extent that the information held on the register is accurate and trusted. Accuracy and trust have traditionally been ensured by using an independent intermediary. However, many existing property registration systems based on intermediaries have limitations and fail to provide a complete, accurate and fully reliable public record. This article addresses whether distributed ledger technology (‘DLT’) is better equipped than intermediaries to achieve the primary aims of disclosure and assurance. In considering the efficacy of DLT in this context, the article analyses three specific use cases as examples: the company charge register, registrable intellectual property (patents and trademarks) and copyright. The article argues that DLT cannot overcome all problems associated with achieving full disclosure and assurance, but in certain contexts it can offer specific advantages over existing registration systems.
Ridesharing is a transportation strategy that allows drivers to share their trips with other people which results in less travel expenses. It also minimizes traffic congestions and carbon emissions. Currently, most of the existing ride-sharing services rely on a central third party, like Uber, Ola, Didi which charges high service fees. In this paper, we are using blockchain technology to build a smart ride-sharing platform - CypherCab. All the services from registering as a driver, to using this platform for ridesharing will be written directly to the blockchain distributed ledger. Utilizing the decentralized nature of blockchain, the data stored in the blocks will be stored in a distributed ledger, hence removing the dependency on a central third-party server. Moreover, blockchain enables us to remove intermediaries and allows direct transactions between the driver and passengers. In this paper, we have implemented a prototype using smart contracts in the Ethereum network and Ganache test network.
Jun 29, 2021·Proceedings of the Twenty-second International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing
Sharding is one of the most promising and practical methods to achieve horizontal scalability of blockchain networks. However, the increasing number of cross-shard transactions in blockchain sharding protocols may degrade the system throughput. In this paper, we investigate how to distribute users properly in the shard-based blockchains to boost the system transaction performance. We first build an open Jackson queueing network model to capture users' transaction dynamics on shards. Then we cast users' interactions as a shard-based blockchain game, wherein each user aims to minimize its transaction confirmation time and transaction fee. We investigate the equilibrium of the game, and design a polynomial-time algorithm to find efficient equilibria with good system performance. We further design a novel sharding protocol with dynamic user distribution for the permissionless blockchain, and the protocol can maintain good performance in long-term dynamic environment. Extensive numerical results using realistic blockchain transaction data demonstrate that the proposed algorithm and the designed protocol can achieve superior performance for shard-based blockchains.
Maria Gorbunova, Pavel Mašek, Mikhail Komarov, Aleksandr Ometov
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is making the first steps toward becoming a solution for the growing number of various decentralized systems worldwide. Unlike pure Blockchain, DLT finds many uses across different industries, including eHealth, finance, supply chain monitoring, and the Internet of Things (IoT). One of the vital DLT features is the ability to provide an immutable and commonly verifiable ledger for larger-scale and highly complex systems. Today?s centralized systems can no longer guarantee the required level of availability and reliability due to the growing number of the involved nodes, complicated heterogeneous architectures, and task load, while the publicly available distributed systems are still in their infancy. This paper aims to provide an exhaustive topical review of the state-of-theart of Distributed Ledger Technology applicability in various sectors. It outlines the importance of the practical integration of technology-related challenges, as well as potential solutions.
In the global trucking industry, vertical collaboration between shippers and carriers is attained by intermediaries, called brokers. Brokers organize carriers for a shipper in accordance with its quality and price requirements, and support carriers to collaborate horizontally by sharing a large distribution order from a shipper. Brokers also act as trustees, preventing the passing of private information of any party to the others. Despite these benefits, intermediaries in the trucking industry are involved in several sustainability problems, including high costs, high levels of carbon emissions, high percentages of empty miles, low-capacity utilizations, and driver shortages. Several studies have acknowledged the importance of improving collaboration to address these problems. Obviously, the major concern of brokers is not collaboration, but rather to optimize their own gains. This paper investigates the potential of blockchain technology to improve collaboration in the trucking industry, by eliminating brokers while preserving their responsibilities as organizers and trustees. This paper extends the transportation control tower concept from the logistics literature, and presents a system architecture for its implementation through smart contracts on a blockchain network. In the proposed system, the scalability and privacy of trucking operations are ensured through integration with privacy-preserving off-chain computation and storage solutions (running outside of the blockchain). The potential of this design artifact for fostering collaboration in the trucking industry was evaluated by both blockchain technology experts and trucking industry professionals.
Zakaria Abou El Houda, Abdelhakim Hafid, Lyes Khoukhi
The emergence of Internet of Energy (IoE) paves the way for sustainable and green energy environments that reduce energy costs and integrate Renewable Energy Sources (RESs) as new sources of energy. Electric vehicles (EVs) are one of the main actors of IoE future. The emergence of EVs promises to reduce the environmental crisis (e.g., carbon emissions); however, their charging process will consume massive amounts of electricity and may affect the reliability of the Smart Grid (SG). Recently, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) electricity trading approach has gained momentum as a novel strategy that reduces the peak power consumption in SG. In this context, EVs compete to provide electricity with lower prices, while maintaining the V2V electricity trading system secure. However, they lack flexibility, transparency, and authenticity. More importantly, they are based on centralized models (i.e., EV aggregators) which introduce single-point-of-failure and may cause the collapse of the system. In this paper, we propose a fully decentralized blockchain-based system that allows for an automated, fair, and trustworthy V2V electricity trading system; it uses Ethereum’s smart contracts to realize the V2V electricity trading system in a fully distributed, transparent, secure, tamper-proof and trustworthy manner. The proposed system is implemented, tested, and deployed on the Ethereum official test network Ropsten. The experiment results show that the proposed solution achieves security, flexibility, efficiency, and cost effectiveness making it a promising solution to new decentralized V2V electricity trading systems in SG.
Car sharing facilitates car owners and renters to share and use their cars conveniently. The popular car-sharing systems like Car2Go or Zipcar provide such facilities; however, they work line an intermediary or broker and thus pose various security and privacy threats. This paper proposes an alternate car-sharing model by constructing a decentralized cab consortium where the car owners and the renters can directly interact and share the car based on certain predefined agreements. We utilize the concept of smart contracts on top of a blockchain platform to realize such a system that provides a secured, tampered-proof, fair, and transparent interface for car sharing. We have implemented the proposed platform over an Ethereum-based environment and show that its runtime cost and performance are within a considerable margin.
As people pay more attention to environment protection, the number of electric vehicles (EVs) is gradually increasing. Energy trading management for EVs is becoming a challenge. However, existing research has not considered the problem of information sharing between energy traders and issues surrounding the protection of user privacy. Therefore, in this article, we propose a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) electricity trading architecture based on blockchain. All energy transactions of EVs can be recorded on the blockchain ledger to ensure privacy and smart contracts work as agents for pricing and optimal energy allocation. Furthermore, we introduce a two-way auction mechanism based on the Bayesian game and design a new price adjustment strategy. Finally, we propose a bidirectional auction mechanism based on the Bayesian game approach. We use extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithm. Simulation results show that the social welfare and cost performance of our algorithm can be improved by up to 102.8% and 319%, respectively.
The prediction of taxi demand service has become a recently attractive area of research along with large-scale and potential applications in the intelligent transportation system. The demand process is divided into two main parts: Picking-up and dropping-off demand based on passenger habit. Taxi demand prediction is a great concept for drivers and passengers, and is designed platforms for ride-hailing and municipal managers. The majority of research has focused on forecasting the pick-up part of demand service and specifying the interconnection of spatial and temporal correlations. In this study, the main focus is to overcome the access point of non-registered users for having fake transactions using taxi services and predicting taxi demand pick-up and drop-off information. The integration of machine learning techniques and blockchain framework is considered a possible solution for this problem. The blockchain technique was selected as an effective technique for protecting and controlling the real-time system. Historical data analysis was processed by extracting the three higher related sections for the intervening time, namely closeness and trend. Next, the pick-up and drop-off taxi prediction task was processed based on constructing the components of multi-task learning and spatiotemporal feature extraction. The combination of feature embedding performance and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) obtain the pick-up and drop-off correlation by fusing the historical data spatiotemporal features. Finally, the taxi demand pick-up and drop-off prediction were processed based on the combination of the external factors. The experimental result is based on a real dataset in Jeju Island, South Korea, to show the proposed system's efficacy and performance compared with other state-of-art models.
Richard Joseph, Rishabh Sah, Atharva Date, Pratik Rane · 5 authors
Blockchain is a technology that is essentially defined as a decentralized storage system for transactions, or ledger of all transactions or digital events that have been shared among the participating groups. A ridesharing system helps riders to reach a particular destination driven by the owner of the ride. There are many existing ridesharing services available in the market today. But most of these services are centralized and hosted by a third party which gives them the authority to monitor features like fare calculation, user data, etc. Privacy and trust are major concerns in such a system. The purpose of our paper is to make a decentralized application for ride-sharing where all transactions, fare calculation, matching and information is stored on a Distributed Ledger. The ledger will be accessible to all the peers in the network. This will match users with rides in a decentralized way without relying on third parties of any centralized network which makes the system transparent and reliable. The data on blockchain is immutable. Hence, this technology is used to store rides and user information to maintain security and ensure user privacy.
Sharding is a promising solution to achieving scalability within the blockchain network. A sharded blockchain network consists of a beacon chain and several committees powered by the participants (i.e., validators) through the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus protocol. Efficient and scalable as it can be, the sharded blockchain based on PoS is vulnerable to discouragement attack. A discouragement attack occurs when malicious validators censor messages to discourage validators from participating in the network. Furthermore, no rate-limiting validator rotation (enter/exit quickly) makes it more challenging to detect such an attack. In this paper, considering the undetermined rotation and the discouragement attack, we render the beacon chain an intermediary, allowing the beacon chain to interact with validators and the cyber-insurer, aiming to encourage the validators' stable rotation through insurance compensation. Specifically, we utilize a two-stage hierarchical game-based model to formulate the complicated interactions under the cyber insurance framework. In the first stage, the beacon chain develops compensatory strategies according to the insurer's profile. In the second stage, the beacon chain designs a series of contracts for validators, including insurance items, compensatory strategies, and rotation requirements. Consequently, the proposed scheme incentivizes validators to remain online by transferring risk to the cyber insurer and enables the sharded blockchain network to weaken the attack's impact through validators' stable rotation. This paper presents closed-form solutions for the proposed model, in which the beacon chain and the cyber insurer can gain maximized profits. The simulations demonstrate the feasibility and superiority of the proposed model.
Ella Tallyn, Joe Revans, Evan Morgan, Keith Fisken · 5 authors
Smart contract systems could change the nature of last-mile delivery for the better through enhanced precision, coordination and accountability. However, technological complexity poses a challenge for end-users participating in the design process, making it hard to explore their experiences and incorporate their perspectives. We describe a case study where technological prototypes create smart contract experiences for professional couriers and receptionists, allowing them to speculate about emerging possibilities, whilst remaining grounded in their current practices. Participants enacted a series of deliveries, choreographed by smart contracts, and their responses were explored in post-experience, one-to-one interviews. Working with professionals to explore the potential impact of smart contract technologies, revealed the systemic webs of value underlying their existing work practices. This has implications for design of such technologies, in which increased automation, efficiency and accountability must be delicately balanced with the benefits of sustaining personal values, relationships and agency.
Offchain networks are dominant as a solution to the scalability problem of blockchain systems, allowing users to perform transactions without their recording on the chain. Offchain networks consist of channels connecting pairs of users with frequent transactions. Transactions between users without a direct channel are also supported through paths of multiple channels but involve payment of fees to intermediate users. A set of pending transactions (the demand) is typically served one by one. This paper proposes a novel approach to reduce the number of offchain transactions and their corresponding fees while preserving the requested impact on user accounts, by performing optimizations directly on the demand matrix. We contribute an analytical characterization of the properties of such offchain payments demand matrix optimizations, present efficient algorithms and report on an empirical evaluation, demonstrating the simplicity and effectiveness of the approach.
The idea of sharing economy gives rise to unique ideas and develops innovative businesses. This article aims to relate the smart city concept by introducing the smart transport system and explores the opportunities of adopting blockchain technology in ride-sharing services. Blockchain technology is a distributed, decentralized public ledger that allows peer-to-peer transactions in a secured way without any third party. This paper proposes a blockchain-based framework from the existing centralized framework for a ride-sharing service and implements the same as a decentralized application (DApp) based on smart contracts on Ethereum Blockchain. Using smart contracts facilitate the users with automated transactions, removes the intermediaries, and enables various activities to be carried out safely and securely. Implementation of smart contracts is done using the Solidity programming language. This DApp uses the min matching algorithm to match riders requesting rideshare to save total travel distance. With the overwhelming growth in the usage of cryptocurrencies, smart contracts usage in applications as proposed in this paper can transform the sharing economy.