A sidechain platform for restaurant e-commerce transactions.

Abstract

Requesting food online is daily present in the lives of people, however, it is necessary to send delivery information to different restaurant systems and sometimes these restaurants share customer-sensitive information with their partners without the authorization of the customer creating a security risk to customers’ data. Also, in most cases when a person travels to a different country and wants to request food online, it is necessary to use the local currency, requiring a currency exchange operation. Blockchains revolutionized the online payment method and intrinsically safely eliminated central authoritative entities with Bitcoin as the first blockchain utilized on a large scale. However, the scientific literature recognizes the difficulties in such technology as scalability flaws in the number of transactions executed per second on Bitcoin, high transaction time, and also the high fee per transaction, beyond the limitation of Script language. The Ethereum Blockchain was raised as a Bitcoin alternative that allowed the development of more complex applications, and despite the increase in the default number of transactions per second, it is still away from payment method solutions such as credit cards, furthermore, it had for a long period a high fee per transaction. In this thesis, we studied and proposed blockchain as a payment method for retail transactions and we created a Proof-Of-Concept (PoC) for restaurants utilizing the Lisk blockchain SDK. The Lisk Restaurant PoC represents an integration of the Lisk blockchain in the food industry allowing customers to order food fast and safely through a sidechain, an exclusive blockchain with specific custom transaction types for restaurants, eliminating third parties, reducing fees, and utilizing a single crypt-asset around the world, LSK. We performed an empirical study on our proposed solution to evaluate the performance of the number of transactions per block, transactions fee, audit ability, scalability of solution, the sending of a data message in transactions safely, and guaranteeing privacy. The results were utilized to compare with known information in literature from blockchains Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Multichain. The specific blockchain transaction types utilized in Lisk Restaurant allow guarantee data privacy for its customers allowing only transaction recipients to access sender data. Hence, through research, revision of previous research findings, and experiments of performance evaluation it was observed that the restaurant sidechain solution demonstrated the efficiency of Blockchain technology in providing global services less costly than regular ways of payment, or even other blockchains as Bitcoin or Ethereum through lower transactions fee, and respecting the privacy of customers. Furthermore, the new solution demonstrated an increase in the maximum number of Food transactions capacity in a single block, and better transaction scalability through sidechains, these accept transactions related to their business differently from blockchains such as Bitcoin or Ethereum that don’t have sidechains as they execute transactions with distinct business needs, superior to the first version of PoC Lisk Restaurant, surpassing by twice in the number of transactions capacity in a single block. Finally, experiments were performed with the Lightning network, an off-chain technology that runs on top of Bitcoin offering a scalability solution for Bitcoin. The evaluation of the results of the experiments of the Lisk sidechain solution and Lightning network show the differences between each technology and highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each one. Hence, it was observed that the Lightning network can be utilized in the retail industry but without the possibility of customized transaction costs.