Building Next Generation IoT Infrastructure for Enabling M2M Crypto Economy

As Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are becoming part of our lives, there is a growing interest to enable using them in our daily lives even for micropayments. This interest stems from many factors including privacy, convenience and overhead/fraud that comes with credit cards. In this regard, Internet of Things (IoT) devices can also benefit from this feature for enabling touchless payments for users. However, there is even a bigger opportunity there considering the nature and diversity of very large-scale unattended IoT devices. The integration of any IoT device with blockchain including cryptocurrencies and smart contracts can trigger a machine-to-machine (M2M) economy revolution by streamlining business among IoT devices. Under such a future business model, IoT devices can autonomously request a service and make a payment in return. Such a large-scale ecosystem should rely on various components thus requiring a paradigm shift on the current design and understanding of the IoT systems. In particular, decentralized architecture of blockchain with cryptocurrency and smart contract capability can be a key enabler. In this vision paper, we advocate the need and necessary elements of a M2M crypto economy infrastructure and investigate the role of blockchain in realizing this vision. We specifically focus on the advantages and challenges of blockchain-based systems along with the existing proposed solutions. We then offer several future directions in creating such a M2M economy. TYPE OF PAPER AND