Blockchain integration with the IoT: a two-sided approach for enhancing scalability and reducing computational fees.

This dissertation discuss the problem of high fees in blockchain scenarios - with special regard to smart contracts - and presents an approach to mitigate this phenomenon on different levels. Off-chain protocols are a new solution for users trying to spend less on blockchain fees. However those solutions cannot match every kind of needs. For what concerns the In- ternet of Things (IoT), the huge amount of data traffic still represent a challenge when trying to integrate IoT devices to smart contract and blockchains, even using off-chain protocols. This dissertation will present Diversity (Div), a second layer protocol for state channels that allows IoT processed data on-chain. Existing off-chain protocols allow smart contracts, but usually they are bound to specific languages or APIs. Only few protocols do not have this restriction for contracts. Since Div is one of them, one can write the contract using IoT oriented languages. For this reason this work will propose the usage of IRON: an ECA language which comes with and IDE and tools for analysing the contract and avoiding errors. This can be a big step forward smart contract development since off-chain contracts still require their on-chain counterparts which make them immutable, thus unpatchable. Div and IRON have been compared with other protocols through simulation and dis- cussion.