Blockchains and Smart Contracts for the Internet of Things

By Konstantinos Christidis, M. Devetsikiotis. IEEE Access, 2016

3,776 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Motivated by the recent explosion of interest around blockchains, we examine whether they make a good fit for the Internet of Things (IoT) sector. Blockchains allow us to have a distributed peer-to-peer network where non-trusting members can interact with each other without a trusted intermediary, in a verifiable manner. We review how this mechanism works and also look into smart contracts-scripts that reside on the blockchain that allow for the automation of multi-step processes. We then move into the IoT domain, and describe how a blockchain-IoT combination: 1) facilitates the sharing of services and resources leading to the creation of a marketplace of services between devices and 2) allows us to automate in a cryptographically verifiable manner several existing, time-consuming workflows. We also point out certain issues that should be considered before the deployment of a blockchain network in an IoT setting: from transactional privacy to the expected value of the digitized assets traded on the network. Wherever applicable, we identify solutions and workarounds. Our conclusion is that the blockchain-IoT combination is powerful and can cause significant transformations across several industries, paving the way for new business models and novel, distributed applications.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c998aeb12b78122ec4143b608b517aef0aa2c821

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Citations in the corpus

Blockchain for Internet of Things: A Survey (2019, methodology): “Moreover, the integration of IoT systems with blockchain technologies (like smart contracts) can help to improve the security of IoT systems by automatically updating IoT device firmwares to remedy vulnerable breaches thereby improving the system security [41].”
Blockchain-based Smart Contracts: A Systematic Mapping Study (2017, background): “In [12], the authors discussed how the combination of blockchain-based smart contracts with the Internet of Thing could be powerful in terms of facilitating the sharing of services.”
Towards Post-Quantum Blockchain: A Review on Blockchain Cryptography Resistant to Quantum Computing Attacks (2020, background): “other external data sources called oracles [22].”
When Mobile Blockchain Meets Edge Computing (2017, background): “Secured Smart Home: Home appliances that upload a large quantity of home and personal data to centralized databases controlled by smart device manufacturers or retailers may be exposed to serious privacy problems [8].”
Blockchain Based Decentralized Management of Demand Response Programs in Smart Energy Grids (2018, background): “Lately, blockchain has been considered as one of the emerging technologies that can be used for developing decentralized grid topologies and enacting the distributed management of energy transactions [22].”
A Secure Charging Scheme for Electric Vehicles With Smart Communities in Energy Blockchain (2019, background): “Within the blockchain context, a smart contract is a set of digital commitments resided on the blockchain that contract participants are agreed with [51].”
A Vademecum on Blockchain Technologies: When, Which, and How (2019, background): “fore application-dependent rules that can vary from system to system [236].”
Blockchain with Internet of Things: Benefits, Challenges, and Future Directions (2018, background): “The total amount of communications that will have to be handled when there are tens of billions of IoT devices will increase those costs substantially [30].”
Blockchain in Industries: A Survey (2019, background): “applications [104]–[107], intrusion detection [91], and Internet of Things (IoT) [95]–[100].”
Internet of Things (IoT) and the Energy Sector (2020, background): “Therefore, any member in blockchain becomes aware of any changes in each block immediately [155–157].”
Blockchains for decentralized optimization of energy resources in microgrid networks (2017, background): “Blockchain research is still a new ﬁeld, with most existing work focused on security and scalability [13], [11] and few applications for controlling physical devices [15], [30].”
Peer-to-Peer Trading in Electricity Networks: An Overview (2020, background): “for trusted intermediaries between transacting parties, and the occurance of malicious and accidental exceptions can be minimized [95].”