Beyond Uber and Lyft: A Decentralized Cab Consortium over Blockchains

Abstract

Car sharing facilitates car owners and renters to share and use their cars conveniently. The popular car-sharing systems like Car2Go or Zipcar provide such facilities; however, they work line an intermediary or broker and thus pose various security and privacy threats. This paper proposes an alternate car-sharing model by constructing a decentralized cab consortium where the car owners and the renters can directly interact and share the car based on certain predefined agreements. We utilize the concept of smart contracts on top of a blockchain platform to realize such a system that provides a secured, tampered-proof, fair, and transparent interface for car sharing. We have implemented the proposed platform over an Ethereum-based environment and show that its runtime cost and performance are within a considerable margin.