CarGo : A Decentralized Protocol for Booking and Payment in Car-Sharing Systems

Sammanfattning: Sharing commodities such as vehicles and houses in exchange for a fee has become very popular in the recent years. Companies such as Uber and Airbnb are two examples where their users can rent their underutilized assets for a period of time. This approach relies in the need of a trusted and centralized third party service provider which introduces security and privacy risks. Specifically, users’ personal data can be collected and misused by the service provider while at the same time the system is more vulnerable to a Distributed Denial of Service attack. In this thesis, a protocol namely CarGo, is presented and aims to allow car owners to rent their cars in a decentralized, secure and private way. Furthermore, this thesis presents a Proof-of-Concept on the Ethereum, Arbitrum and Optimism blockchains where a Solidity smart contract is utilized for automatic execution of car booking and payment functionalities. The solution ensures security and privacy of the booking details and offers safeguards against malicious behavior. Furthermore, with the deployment of the smart contract in layer two blockchain solutions the transactional fees have been greatly reduced.