The sharing economy, the business of collectively using privately owned objects and services, has fuelled some of the fastest growing businesses of the past years. However, popular sharing platforms like Airbnb or Uber exhibit several drawbacks: a cumbersome sign up procedure, lack of participant privacy, overbearing terms and conditions, and significant fees for users. We demonstrate a Decentralised App (DAPP) for the sharing of everyday objects based on a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain. This contract enables users to register and rent devices without involvement of a Trusted Third Party (TTP), disclosure of any personal information or prior sign up to the service. With increasing distribution of cryptocurrencies the use of smart contracts such as proposed in this paper has the potential to revolutionise the sharing economy.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy markets are gaining interest in the energy sector as a means to increase the share of decentralised energy resources (DER), thus fostering a clean, resilient and decentralised supply of energy. Various reports have touted P2P energy markets as ideal use case for blockchain-technology, as it offers advantages such as fault-tolerant operation, trust delegation, immutability, transparency, resilience, and automation. However, relatively little is known about the influence of hardware and communication infrastructure limitations on blockchain systems in real-life applications. In this article, we demonstrate the implementation of a real-world blockchain managed microgrid in Walenstadt, Switzerland. The 37 participating households are equipped with 75 special smart-meters that include single board computers (SBC) that run their own, application-specific private blockchain. Using the field-test setup, we provide an empirical evaluation of the feasibility of a Byzantine fault tolerant blockchain system. Furthermore, we artificially throttle bandwidth between nodes to simulate how the bandwidth of communication infrastructure impacts its performance. We find that communication networks with a bandwidth smaller than 1000 kbit/s-which includes WPAN, LoRa, narrowband IoT, and narrowband PLC-lead to insufficient throughput of the operation of a blockchain-managed microgrid. While larger numbers of validators may provide higher decentralisation and fault-tolerant operation, they considerably reduce throughput. The results from the field-test in the Walenstadt microgrid show that the blockchain running on the smart-meter SBCs can provide a maximum throughput of 10 transactions per second. The blockchain throughput halts almost entirely if the system is run by more than 40 validators. Based on the field test, we provide simplified guidelines for utilities or grid operators interested in implementing local P2P markets based on BFT systems.
Due to environmental and resiliency benefits, distributed energy resources (DER) are a potential solution for meeting future electricity demand, but their integration into centralized power markets on the large scale is challenging. Many practitioners argue that blockchain technology can create new market structures for DER like local peer-topeer energy markets which foster renewable generation. To get an understanding of the status quo of the research on blockchain-based energy exchange, we conducted a systematic literature review on the existing academic articles and industry projects. This article describes the design and technical specifications of the first real blockchain-based electricity market in Switzerland derived from this literature review and outlines the implementation of this market in the real world. The findings provide valuable guidelines for the integration of DER into future sustainable energy markets.
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