Blockchain and IoT Integration for Society 5.0

The integration of Blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) will have many implications in the Society 5.0. Blockchain technology has the potential to deal with issues that are related to data ownership, data integrity and data market monopolies. Public blockchains support the implementation of the data democratisation vision where everybody has access to data and there are no gatekeepers that make use of isolated data silos. Smart contracts can be used to provide contract transparency and allow citizens to manage their own data and the deriving economic value. This paper describes a novel blockchain-based security protocol that has been applied to a bicycle rental case study. This has been designed and implemented with the Society 5.0 vision in mind. Users store their own rental data by using a public blockchain. This eliminates the need of a centralised authority, provides data immutability and allows users to agree on transparent smart contract to manage their insurance, their payments and their own rental data. The smart lock protocol has been implemented in a real industrial product that uses the Ethereum public blockchain.