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Seminar On Blockchain Technology

The document summarizes a project that implements a blockchain-based application for renting properties online. The application allows property owners to list their rentals and potential renters to request contracts. Smart contracts automate the rental process, deposit exchanges, and dispute resolution through a referee role. The project uses Ethereum for transactions, MongoDB for data storage, and AngularJS for the front-end interface. Code and documentation are available on Bitbucket.

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26 views

Seminar On Blockchain Technology

The document summarizes a project that implements a blockchain-based application for renting properties online. The application allows property owners to list their rentals and potential renters to request contracts. Smart contracts automate the rental process, deposit exchanges, and dispute resolution through a referee role. The project uses Ethereum for transactions, MongoDB for data storage, and AngularJS for the front-end interface. Code and documentation are available on Bitbucket.

Uploaded by

someone
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Seminar on BlockChain Technology

Report of the project ChainUrRents, presented by Luciano García-Bañuelos

Authors: Andreas Ellervee


Orlenys López Pintado

University of Tartu
January, 2017

General Flow Description

In this project, we had to implement a blockchain-based market application that


enables people to rent properties online. The system stores and manages the
information about all the properties that should be added by their corresponding
owners. A client who wants to rent a property will access the list of available
properties and he can pick the desired one. Both, user and owner must be registered
in our system for taking part in contracts or for adding properties, in the case of
owners.
Once a client selects a property, he sends a contract request to the owner who may
accept or reject the proposal. When the owner accepts, the client must pay the rent of
the first month and a deposit (50% of rental cost), followed by owners payment who
sends a deposit on the same amount as the client. Before the owner’s transaction, the
contract may be canceled by both without fee (e.g. if the counterpart is slow to
answer). After that, they also have 72 hours to cancel, but now a 50% of the deposit
will be sent to the other part as compensation.
If no cancellation occurs, the system keeps waiting for the meeting where the client
will receive the keys of his new house. When any of involved part incurs in a
violation on the meeting data (e.g, some of them do not assist), the contract will
finish and the affected part will receive the deposit from the other one. A third role
was added in our system to act as referee who solves discrepancies between client
and owner (deciding who is right), in cases as the previously described. If the
meeting was a success, the application transacts the rental cost from the client to the
owner who also gets his deposit back. The system preserves the client’s deposit until
he leaves the property when the rental period finishes. The user receives his deposit
back when the contract ends, if everything was fine during the rental period,
otherwise the deposit will go to the owner. At this point our referee role may act to
solve any disagreement.
Application Description
Our solution was structured on two back-ends and one front-end applications.
The first back-end application was designed to guarantee the reliability of the
transactions. We modeled the flow of the rental contract using BPMN 2.0 1 (see
Figure 1) and we deployed the resulting model as a smart contract in an Ethereum
Blockchain Network. Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts:
applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime,
censorship, fraud or third party interference2. We implemented the smart contract in
Solidity, a contract-oriented high level language designed to runs into the Ethereum
Virtual Machine3. Each node in our model becomes a function in our smart contract.
As exception, consecutive service activities (designed to be executed automatically)
were joined into the same function to avoid ether consumption on unnecessary
function calls. The smart contract validates and executes all the operations that
involve money transactions between client and owner, offering the reliability of the
Blockchain Network.
For testing our blockchain application we have to run testrpc that is a Node.js based
Ethereum client for testing and development. It uses ethereumjs to simulate full client
behavior and to develop Ethereum applications4. The test server offers 10 blockchain
addresses with a default amount of ether, so client and owner must select one of these
for the money transactions.
The second back-end application, was designed to store all the information about the
users, roles, properties and contract requests handled by the system. For this
application, we used MongoDB that is an open-source document database that
provides high performance, high availability and automatic scaling 5. This application
avoids storing and managing information not related to money transactions, into the
Blockchain Network, reducing the ether consumption (and transaction fees) only to
the operations involved in the money transactions.
The web front-end application guarantees the interaction of the users with our rental
system. It was implemented in AngularJS that offers a structural framework for
dynamic web applications. It allows to use HTML 5 as template language and extend
HTML syntax to express the application’s components clearly and succinctly 6. In
addition, the implementation of the the controllers and services of the front-end
1 http://www.bpmn.org/.

2 https://www.ethereum.org/.

3 https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop/.
4 https://github.com/ethereumjs/testrpc.
5 https://www.mongodb.com/.
application was done in JavaScript. We utilized the web3 object provided by the
JavaScript web3.js library to interact with our smart contract in Blockchain. This
library works with any Ethereum node, which exposes an RPC layer, it communicates
to a local node through RPC calls7. We used Angular’s $resource for our API calls to
the MongoDB back-end application. These services retrieve data in JSON format and
then we can use it in our Angular controllers.

Code Repository

The code of the resulting application, instructions for running it and the BPMN
model can be downloaded from:
https://bitbucket.org/andreasellervee/blockchain-seminar/overview

6 https://angularjs.org/
7 https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/JavaScript-API.
Figure 1: BPMN model of the smart contract.

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