Realization and Evaluation of Marketplace Functionalities Using Ethereum Blockchain

Usage of IoT marketplaces as central components in distributed systems have become common, as they allow for easy exploitation of other services and data sources. When relying on a marketplace to be available in order for a system to be operational, it is critical that the marketplace operation is highly robust. Marketplaces are typically centralized components which means that single point of failure is a possible issue. Also users of the marketplace must trust the operator to be fair and follow a common set of rules. This work proposes to utilize blockchain technology to realize a distributed marketplace where both functionalities and storage are distributed and thereby increasing availability to users, while removing the need for a central operator. The blockchain also makes the operational rules transparent to the users of the marketplace. In this relation two core marketplace functionalities, offering creation and discovery, are realized using smart contracts on a private Ethereum blockchain and evaluated using an experimental testbed. The results demonstrate the feasibility of a blockchain based marketplace implementation.