Viktor Valaštín, Kritian Kost'al, Rastislav Bencel, Ivan Kotuliak
The car-sharing market is constantly growing and recently it has become even more popular than car ownership. However, classic car-sharing system is based on a centralized database server which can often lead to hacker attacks or password leaks. Moreover, in a classic car-sharing system, the owners of the cars can misuse customers' data. As seen nowadays from a lot of use cases, the best solution to these problematic issues is to use blockchain technology. Blockchain as decentralized, immutable, public ledger provides the customers with security that is impossible to tamper. The aim of the proposed solution is to create and implement peer-to-peer short term car-sharing application based on blockchain technology and smart contracts. For the implementation of smart contracts, Solidity programming language is used. Solidity works with Ethereum blockchain. The key novelty of the article is introducing a peer-to-peer car sharing service without a central authority, what reflects a decrease of costs and increase of data transparency in that system. Also token based solution gives us ability to cover business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) use cases.
Sofiane Benahmed, Ivan Pidikseev, Rasheed Hussain, Jooyoung Lee · 7 authors
Development of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)-based applications requires an appropriate platform that meets the application requirements. However, due to the abundance of such platforms such as Ethereum, NEM, IOTA, and OpenChain, and the differences among them in terms of scalability, throughput, and features, it is not easy to select a platform for a given use-case. Selection of the right DLT platform is pivotal for the performance of applications and thus-forth directly affects consumer satisfaction. Therefore, the aforementioned factors must be taken into account to decide on a particular platform. To fill this gap, in this paper, we conduct a comparative analysis of different DLT platforms. The choice of platform is based on their popularity and current market share as well as the evolving trends and approaches. In essence, we choose Ethereum, EOS, Hyperledger Sawtooth and NEO. We compare these platforms from both development and performance perspectives. The comparison revealed that Sawtooth provides a huge customization capability that affects the performance and EOS maintains a stable throughput under varying network scales and loads.
The sport industry has experienced significant technological change in its environment with the recent rise of Bitcoin and its underlying foundation, blockchain. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to introduce and conceptually ground blockchain in sport and discuss the implications and value proposition of blockchain to the sport industry. After a brief overview of blockchain and the technology stack, the mechanism is conceptually rooted in the network paradigm, a framework already known to the academic sport community. This treatment argues that the decentralized, closed, and dense mesh network produced by blockchain technology is beneficial to the sport industry. Notably, the article identifies blockchain’s capacity to facilitate new sources of revenue and improve data management and suggests that sport management and communication consider the value of blockchain and the technology stack as the digital footprint in the industry intensifies and becomes increasingly complex.
Social network advertising is currently one of the most effective advertising types available to promote a product or a brand. The problem discussed in this paper concerns the possibility to ensure that advertising reaches really interested users, and also to prove this. At this aim, we propose the use of Blockchain to store users' interest and to obtain an assertion that a user is interested in a product before the advertising is shown. The proposal has been implemented by a Solidity smart contract in Ethereum and has been shown to be effective and cheap.
Vikas Hassija, Mohd Zaid, Gurjot Singh, Amit Srivastava · 5 authors
Blockchain is a growing list of records, stored in blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography. Blockchain is important because it brings trust to peer-to-peer networks. Various blockchain applications from small to big are focused towards decentralizing different tasks and are trying to empower the masses to act without any intermediary in between. The existing and upcoming blockchain applications are highly promising to increase the level of comfort for everyone. Smart contracts can be thought of as self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement between buyer and seller directly written into lines of code. In this paper, we present a detailed review of how blockchain and smart contracts can be used to create a platform for car rental services that will be beneficial for both the car owner and the renter. The platform is cost optimal because there will be no intermediary in between. This will also introduce high security, privacy, authentication, and safety in the car rental industry.
Muhammad Shahid, Sheraz Mahmood, Sana Hafeez, Bilal Zahid · 6 authors
Blockchain is attracting attention from academia and Industry as well due to its amalgamation of various characteristics; cryptography, public key infrastructure, and economic modeling, that is applied to peer-to-peer networking and decentralized consensus to achieve distributed database synchronization. Among other applications of Blockchain, secure and decentralized way of sharing economy is one of the most emergent ones. In this paper, we have proposed a Blockchain based share economy model. Blockchain Share Economy Trust point (SE-TP) mechanism is at the core of the idea for the lender and renter communication. Using SE_TP, the sharing economy communication environment provide effective data management along with data security and reliability. Also, the detail of every shared item can be accessed ubiquitously. A case study to validate the proposed idea is also presented.
Ride-sharing is a service that enables drivers to share trips with other riders, contributing to appealing benefits of shared travel cost and reducing traffic congestion. However, the majority of existing ride-sharing services rely on a central third party to organize the service, which make them subject to a single point of failure and privacy disclosure concerns by both internal and external attackers. Moreover, they are vulnerable to distributed denial of service (DDoS) and Sybil attacks launched by malicious users and external attackers. Besides, high service fees are paid to the ride-sharing service provider. In this paper, we propose a decentralized ride-sharing service based on public Blockchain, named B-Ride. B-Ride enables drivers to offer ride-sharing services without relying on a trusted third party. Both riders and drivers can learn whether they can share rides while preserving their trip data, including pick-up/drop-off location, departure/arrival date and travel price. However, malicious users exploit the anonymity provided by the public blockchain to submit multiple ride requests or offers, while not committing to any of them, in order to find a better offer or to make the system unreliable. B-Ride solves this problem by introducing a time-locked deposit protocol for a ride-sharing by leveraging smart contract and zero-knowledge set membership proof. In a nutshell, both a driver and a rider have to show their good will and commitment by sending a deposit to the blockchain. Later, a driver has to prove to the blockchain on the agreed pick-up time that he/she arrived at the pick-up location on time. To preserve rider/driver privacy by hiding the exact pick-up location, the proof is performed using zero-knowledge set membership proof. Moreover, to ensure fair payment, a pay-as-you-drive methodology is introduced based on the elapsed distance of the driver and rider. In addition, we introduce a reputation model to rate drivers based on their past behaviour without involving any third-parties to allow riders to select them based on their history on the system. Finally, we implement our protocol and deploy it in a test net of Ethereum. The experimental results show the applicability of our protocol atop existing real-world blockchains.
Ride-sharing is a service that enables drivers to share their trips with\nother riders, contributing to appealing benefits of shared travel costs.\nHowever, the majority of existing platforms rely on a central third party,\nwhich make them subject to a single point of failure and privacy disclosure\nissues. Moreover, they are vulnerable to DDoS and Sybil attacks due to\nmalicious users involvement. Besides, high fees should be paid to the service\nprovider. In this paper, we propose a decentralized ride-sharing service based\non public Blockchain, named B-Ride. Both riders and drivers can find rides\nmatch while preserving their trip data, including pick-up/drop-off location,\nand departure/arrival date. However, under the anonymity of the public\nblockchain, a malicious user may submit multiple ride requests or offers, while\nnot committing to any of them, to discover better offer or to make the system\nunreliable. B-Ride solves this problem by introducing a time-locked deposit\nprotocol for a ride-sharing by leveraging smart contract and zero-knowledge set\nmembership proof. In a nutshell, both a driver and a rider have to show their\ncommitment by sending a deposit to the blockchain. Later, a driver has to prove\nto the blockchain on the agreed departure time that he has arrived at the\npick-up location. To preserve rider/driver location privacy by hiding the exact\npick-up location, the proof is done using zero-knowledge set membership\nprotocol. Moreover, to ensure a fair payment, a pay-as-you-drive methodology is\nintroduced based on the elapsed distance of the driver and the rider. Also, we\nintroduce a reputation-based trust model to rate drivers based on their past\ntrips to allow riders to select them based on their history on the system.\nFinally, we implement B-Ride in a test net of Ethereum. The experiment results\nshow the applicability of our protocol atop the existing real-world blockchain.\n
Josep Lluís Ferrer Gomila, M. Francisca Hinarejos, Andreu Pere Isern-Deyà
Electronically signing contracts is fundamental for e-commerce transactions. The main property that contract signing protocols must achieve is fairness of the exchange. The solutions presented to date are divided into two major types: those that have a trusted third party (TTP) to achieve fairness and those that do not. In the literature, we find more than 40 published proposals, but none of these proposed protocols has become a recognized or de facto standard in the market. Blockchain has provided a new way to address classic problems such as double spending, as well as problems such as fairness. In this article, we present a protocol for contract signing based on blockchain. Our proposed protocol does not require a conventional TTP, and it does not present the disadvantages of solutions without a TTP (computational and/or communication cost). The protocol satisfies the necessary security requirements: fairness, timeliness and non-repudiation. We demonstrate the feasibility of the protocol with a cost analysis and a proof of concept implementation. In addition, we show how Ethereum can be integrated in our solution as an alternative platform to the use of Bitcoin. Finally, we show how our proposal improves previous solutions for contract signing based on blockchain in terms of cost, efficiency and security.
Blockchain's properties in addressing trust in highly decentralized environments can make it an enabler for novel sharing economy services. In this paper, we demonstrate the practicality of blockchain-based Secure IoT as a Service (SIoTaaS), where an IoT device can be rented from a service provider, securely and in a privacy-preserving fashion. Our framework allows the simultaneous operations of distinct providers of IoT-based sharing economy services at a large scale. Multiple parties can securely share text and multimedia in the context of location and point-of-interest sharing, perform financial transactions by hiding true identity of parties involved in various online transactions, perform user and IoT registration, transfer value transactions via Ethereum tokens between providers and consumers, as well as raw IoT data payload. This can turn smart room IoT devices, such as smart locks, light bulbs, air conditioning and fans into rentable business entities within a secure sharing economy platform. We will demonstrate such a proof of concept IoT sharing economy framework, which is specifically designed to support the temporary IoT needs of very large numbers of users, such as Hajj pilgrims concentrating for a short period of time at a single area in Saudi Arabia.
Niclas Kannengießer, Sebastian Lins, Tobias Dehling, Ali Sunyaev
When developing peer-to-peer applications on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), a crucial decision is the selection of a suitable DLT design (e.g., Ethereum) because it is hard to change the underlying DLT design post hoc. To facilitate the selection of suitable DLT designs, we review DLT characteristics and identify trade-offs between them. Furthermore, we assess how DLT designs account for these trade-offs and we develop archetypes for DLT designs that cater to specific quality requirements. The main purpose of our article is to introduce scientific and practical audiences to the intricacies of DLT designs and to support development of viable applications on DLT.
As the adoption of blockchain technology increases, those wanting to leverage it will need to consider some of the legal challenges under GDPR. The aim of this article is to explore the unique characteristics of blockchain and to identify some of the issues that might arise under GDPR when implementing this technology in an interactive entertainment context.
Ridesharing or carpooling has a valuable potential in large cities that suffer from traffic jams and congestion especially in places with poor public transportation infrastructure and fuel trip expenses are too high. By increasing the level of vehicles occupancy; colleagues who share the same workplace can smoothly hop into each other's vehicles to reach their destination. In this research paper we utilize the decentralization nature of the blockchain to build a smart ridesharing application - GreenRide - through incentivizing its users via token rewards. Our work investigates boosting ridesharing efficiency through utilizing the blockchain merits of decentralization, trustless, and scalability. We also emphasize on the application's environmental impacts where it promotes carbon emission reduction, and enhances air quality. Moreover, the research paper identifies GreenRide's economic and social impacts as per it helps road users to share the costly fuel expenses and to create friendships between like-minded people respectively. The research findings unlock the tremendous potential of the blockchain technology in other business-related fields not only limited to finance and cryptocurrencies.
This paper explores how distributed ledger technology (DLT) can contribute to the instant payments market, discussing the potential impacts of the technology. The paper defines how the locus of control in DLT shifts from centralised system administrators to end users, while the locus of knowledge shifts from organisational to smart-contract programmers’ knowledge. The radical implementation of DLT is depicted as a single-layer network where intermediaries are eliminated from the payment cycle, while the conservative approach is described as the gradual application of some DLT components into existing ecosystems. Both designs are briefly discussed from the perspective of database centrality, technological literacy and quality assurance. The paper then compares DLT and instant payments schemes through the lens of standardisation, market adoption and platformisation. The paper shows that to be successful, both instant payment systems and DLT need to gain traction in the market, and that service fragmentation must be resolved by unifying the market. The paper ends by contrasting the various components of instant payment and DLT systems, and concluding that while DLT remains an evolving technology, instant payment systems will continue to play a more prominent role in the market.
istributed ledger technology (DLT) and blockchain, and their headline-catching applications in cryptoassets and initial coin offerings (ICOs), have attracted extraordinary global attention. Alongside Bitcoin's spectacular rise and fall in the past few years, there has been an explosion of ICOs, a tokenization of assets, and fund-raising projects utilizing digital tokens issued and operated on blockchains.
Abstract This study considers cultural crowdfunding as a heterogeneous system that allows money and attention to flow from backers to founders of cultural projects in diverse cultural sectors and focuses on the nature of the standards governing it. It analyzes Kickstarter’s corporate blog since the platform’s launch and finds indications that social media practices are increasingly naturalized as integral to crowdfunding and that social media architectures are increasingly adopted by the crowdfunding platform. This, I argue, has a potential exclusionary effect. At the same time, the analysis finds evidence that Kickstarter is striving to develop an independent capacity to set aesthetic standards, which might moderate that effect and help constitute crowdfunding as an alternative decentralized arena for the funding of culture.
In Blockchain networks involving multiple applications, the quality of service of an application is affected by the transaction ordering. We study a setting where each application is represented by a node, which might attempt to prioritize its own transactions through including them early in blocks added to the blockchain. A fair block proposal of a node follows a random selection of the transactions among the set of pending transactions the node is aware of. On the contrary, a dishonest node includes more of its transactions at the expense of transactions of other applications. In this work, we propose a toolbox of techniques to enforce such a fair block selection. First, we design an accurate statistical testing for the honesty of a proposal and explain it. Next, we describe a reputation system, documenting honesty of nodes to encourage fairness. Our last technique enforces fair block selection through concise commitments on the set of pending transactions known to a node.
Simultaneously with the fall of the Berlin wall, we witnessed the process of general acceptance of the Internet as mainstream. Opportunities created in the last 30 years by the Internet, and particularly in the last 10 years with the dramatic increase in the number of smart devices, created new business model. Namely, internet giants such as Google, Facebook, Uber or Airbnb have created on-line platforms through which they aggregate the potential resources of a large number of individuals to provide services to even larger and a group of consumers. The previous business model was based on centralized organizations, often with a dominant position in the market in charge of providing services to a group of passive consumers. The new type of “dematerialized” organizations doesn’t rely on ownership of property. However, the profit generated by this new model is not fairly distributed - mediators who manage and own on-line platforms retain the profits. Recently new technology called blockchain emerged. The purpose of this new technology is to facilitating the exchange in a reliable and decentralized way without intermediaries. Blockchain technology allows substitution of hierarchical model of management with a computer system that is decentralized and distributed among individual participants. This concept can changes the way the profit is distributed, allowing people to work for creation of common good, whereby everyone will be appropriately rewarded for their labour and engaged resources. But when talking about new disruptive technologies we need to be careful due to the fact that at its creation the internet was intended to narrow the gap between small entities and large corporations, yet over time internet giants took control of the digital world. The aim of this paper was to give an overview of the possibilities and challenges of blockchain technology. The paper will make a theoretical analysis of the relevant papers in the subject area and will present concluding observations regarding the dilemma whether this new technology is utopia that is in advance condemned to failure or will succeed in the intention of fair distribution. The conclusions suggest that organisation without hierarchy is utopian, but our finding shows that DAO is possible with using blockchain technology, although it raises many questions (liability, tax payments, jurisdiction etc.). But we need to be careful due to the fact that internet giants took control of the digital world. Finally, social relationships are aspect that will be big drawback for DAO.
Elva Leka, Luis Lamani, Besnik Selimi, Elio Decolli
In this paper, we propose to use the blockchain technology as a mechanism to store and share geospatial projects. Blockchain helps to improve efficiency and security. Smart contracts provide a secure, distributed and shared decentralized ledger of all assets and transactions. We will discuss a way to implement a platform on which scientists can share their studies. We propose a design methodology for the mentioned smart contracts, which enables the development of different use cases using blockchain technology. A detailed design of the smart contracts, functions and processes is presented. We will provide an outline of advantages and limitations of blockchain in general, and for the proposed platform.
Chris Elsden, Tom Feltwell, Shaun Lawson, John Vines
This paper presents a qualitative study of the recent integration of a UK-based, digital-first mobile banking app - Monzo - with the web automation service IFTTT (If This Then That). Through analysis of 113 unique IFTTT 'recipes' shared by Monzo users on public community forums, we illustrate the potentially diverse functions of these recipes, and how they are achieved through different kinds of automation. Beyond achieving more convenient and efficient financial management, we note many playful and expressive applications of conditionality and automation that far extend traditional functions of banking applications and infrastructure. We use these findings to map opportunities, challenges and areas of future research in the development of 'programmable money' and related financial technologies. Specifically, we present design implications for the extension of native digital banking applications; novel uses of banking data; the applicability of blockchains and smart contracts; and future forms of financial autonomy.