Democratizing Access to Utilities — Blockchain for Smart City

Blockchain technology has a lot to offer to internet users: strengthening digital rights, authenticating digital access, or securing digital properties. Yet we are far from mass adoption, and the blockchain future is blurred by a mix of bad financial news, mindless commercial marketing, and a vague libertarian philosophy that has a hard time convincing while promising magic money.

As an urban developer and scientist, my efforts to contribute to Blockchain adoption focus on building it as a means to democratize access to utilities. Since the essence of cities has always been to share utilities between a gathering of inhabitants, I am tempted to think of blockchain in an urban context, where users could onboard massively if they had a purpose. Blockchain would help democratize access to a common resource or a shared utility within the daily functioning of an average city.

PLAN:

1. Open Technology in the City
   - Blockchain to support perpetual change
   - Blockchain to organize urban chaos
   - Blockchain to add use value to cities
2. Personal Property in Digital Times
   - What’s wrong with NFTs?
   - How could we make NFTs better?
   - Peer-to-peer sharing system for digital properties
3. A strategic approach to Blockchain Cities
   - Blockchain for Smart and Sustainable Cities
   - My personal experience on Blockchain Cities use cases
   - Blockchain-controlled smart locks

A city is a combination of open resources and personal properties. Both are everywhere in urban areas. The wealthiest inhabitants use common public infrastructures and the most precarious ones own goods they usually carry with them around town. The urban infrastructure, an overlay of technical and social networks intertwined with an accumulation of physical matter shaped for human comfort, contains infinite artifacts made of permanent assembling, de-assembling, and re-assembling of elements. The urban infrastructure can be thought of as a network of temporary properties, adaptive to constant transformations. I like to think of the blockchain as a new pervasive socio-technical urban infrastructure, adding use value to pre-existing cities. This definition will help extend the capabilities of blockchain technology from an abstracted alternative to a banking system to a network of canisters for phygital artifacts (a blending of physical and digital items).

1. Open Technology within the city

The process of industrialization has been the dynamic of transformations in society for the last two centuries, but cities have been centers of social and political life, and an accumulation of wealth, way before that: objects, treasures, virtual capitals, knowledge, techniques, and cultural wonders, works of art, monuments, are gathered since human settlements existed. With industrialization though, wealth ceased to be mainly in real estate to be invested in a productive infrastructure. At the same time, banking made wealth mobile and established exchange networks enabling the transfer of money, and industrialization enabled the virtually unlimited extension of exchange values. This period of modernity has shown how merchandise is not only a way of putting people in relation to each other, but also a logic, a language, and a world.

As long as industrialization was the main mobile for urbanization, growth and development, economic production, and social life, the active population left the city for the industrial agglomeration around or aside from it. Old agrarian structures dissolved, and dispossessed peasants crowd into cities to find work and subsistence, at the same time as many old urban cores deteriorated or exploded. The wealth move to distant residential or productive peripheries, and offices replaced housing in urban centers. Sometimes these centers are abandoned to the ‘poor’ and become ghettos for the underprivileged. Throughout history, the urban cores have been the support of a more or less intense, more or less degraded, ‘way of life’ but never disappeared. The urbanization phenomena sometimes erode them or integrate them into their web, and urban cores survive by transforming themselves. They survive because of this double role: as a place of consumption and consumption of place. Urban centers gather social interaction, exchange value, and information, capacities of organization, and institutional decision-making power, and appear constantly as a project in the making of a new centrality. In theory, the concept of the city is made up of facts, representations, and images borrowed from the past, but in a process of transformation and new elaboration.

Blockchain to support perpetual change:

Over the last decade urban theory mixed with the hacker’s culture and the sharing economy, tentatively defined as “open-source urbanism”. A rise of urban innovation prototypes emerged everywhere from the tech industry and the DIY movement and a lot of them aimed to impact pre-existing social organizations. This ambition is nested in the underlying philosophy of the internet, which destabilizes the classical regulatory frameworks of our societies. Open-source projects are built on a network of expertise and skills that cross localized boundaries. They are transforming the stakes in and the models of property and governance. According to Alberto Corsin Gimenez, author of “The Right to Infrastructure: a prototype for open source urbanism” the infrastructure of cities is contoured as “transductive” landscapes of social relations and code, which should lead to adopting an infrastructure-centric point of view to developing cities, and therefore to giving the infrastructures their own rights.

Open-source urban technologies must be thought of as a manifestation of this expanded cyborg “beta” urbanism, rather than as an extension or supplement to regular social capabilities. In fact, the infrastructure isn’t something that is added to the social, but instead, something that is inscribed as a right to define and redefine one’s social being. In the open technology era, most prototypes will never reach closure, yet they keep forking and enabling novel extensions of themselves. Prototypes aren’t aiming for their final state as much as they look for proliferation on the infrastructure, through a constant cycle of construction, deconstruction, and reassembling. We may think of the prototype as a kind of ‘infrastructural being’: a fluctuating of persons and things whose holding processes ‘in suspension’ of personal belongings and social influences. In such dynamic movements of short-term properties and personal self-being, an open ledger keeping records of belongings and attached digital identities is the perfect infrastructure to support society at scale.

Blockchain to organize urban chaos:

We can distinguish three periods in modern cities’ history:
- First: The process of industrialization deconstructs pre-existing urban reality and transforms its practice and ideology into exchange value.
- Second: Urbanization spreads and urban society becomes global. A new urban consciousness is acknowledged as a socio-economic reality.
- Third: Urban centers reinvent urban realities, by attempting to restitute centrality, not without suffering from their destruction in practice or in thinking. Thus is born or reborn urban thought. The city appears as a specific level of social reality, of immediate personal and interpersonal relations, separated from urban reality through abstraction. Urban analysts can perceive why and how global processes (economic, social, political, and cultural) have formed urban space and shaped cities. The transformations of everyday life modified urban realities without any voluntary conscious mediation. Restituting centrality, and reinventing urban cores, means establishing or re-establishing coherence in chaotic confusion. The analysis of urban phenomena requires going from the most general knowledge to particular and specific knowledge of each urban reality. It requires the integration of discontinuities between urban formations, social relations, and relations between individuals and groups which are all de-structurations and re-structurations followed in time and space, always translated on the ground, inscribed in the physical reality of cities, coming from history and future.

Henri Lefebvre in The Right to the City (1968) proposes a definition of the city as “a projection of society on the ground, not only on the actual site but at a specific level, perceived and conceived by thought, which determines the city and the urban”. The multiplication and complexification of exchanges cannot take place without the existence of privileged spaces and moments, of meeting freed from the constraints of the market, aside from the means of exchange value, and without the relations which condition profits. As it is preoccupied with principally planning industry and organizing the enterprise, blockchain developers appeared little able to give solutions to the urban problem and to act otherwise than by technical performances which only protect the current state of affairs. The ‘socialization of technology’, misunderstood by marketers has prevented mass adoption. The anarchist discourse, the pirate hacker persona, has scared and killed enthusiasm in the nest. Socialization, meaning massive adoption by society, essentially means urbanization. By providing a standard for the digital recording and transferring of anything, blockchain presents itself as the best support for organizing urban chaos, adding value to all cities.

Blockchain to add use value to cities:

The world of merchandise has its immanent logic of money and exchange value generalized without limits. Urban society, a collection of actions taking place in time, privileging a space and privileged by it, has a logic different from that of merchandise. The urban is based on use value. The latest decade of massive internet adoption and social media shows us a refocusing of social relationships toward information technologies. Use value, subordinated for centuries to exchange value, somehow came primary again, by and in urban societies, whose reality still resists and preserves the use value of a city. Bike-sharing, car-sharing, house-sharing, co-working, and community-operated spaces, spread in urban areas through inhabitants’ initiatives recalling their local government to protect the remaining city centers over specific conflicts: between the use value and exchange value, between the mobilization of private wealth and unproductive public spending, by participating in the regulation of the distribution of activities and time allocation toward streets and neighborhoods.

In recent decades, cities have been exposed to a growing technologization of their infrastructure and inhabitants. Information technologies are usually open and available to all in urban areas, yet they depend on complex infrastructures of hardware, software, and resources that have to be maintained, managed, and preserved. Open technologies need rules for access, extraction, and exclusion, built to ensure the long-term sustainability of the common resource. Digital ownership, property over personal data, user profiles, and collections of digital items, represent values within their economic models and can be leveraged to incentivize users in adopting the most responsible behavior toward a common resource for all inhabitants. The tokenization of real-world assets, and their integration in a token economy where crypto users will be granted privileged rights or profits for adopting the best behavior for society at scale, would be a huge contribution of blockchain technology to adding use value to any city.

2. Personal Property in Digital Times

We experienced a major shift from analog to digital goods in the last decade. Media content like books, music, and movies, but also software-enabled devices, phones, cars, and medical devices have been fulfilled with digital. In the courts, in the marketplace, and in our homes, we find evidence that our rights to own, control, repair, and use the products we buy, depend in large part, on whether those goods are analog or digital. In fact, the legal frameworks of personal properties are very different whether it is analog or digital. Rules of analog ownership seem obvious as the same has been applied to any movable property for hundreds of years. Digital properties are ruled otherwise: you merely don’t own the e-books you buy, you rather own a license for them. This means: you have permission to read them for some time. Period.

The digital ownership matter goes well beyond books. All our digital rights are defined by a nonnegotiable agreement that runs counter to what most of us think we can do with the products we buy or the services we use. The anemic understanding of consumer rights that manufacturers and retailers are pushing is essentially contesting ownership. The most immediate consequence of non-ownership is the long list of substantive rights we lose. You can’t resell a product you don’t own. You can’t lend it, give it away, or donate it. You can’t read, watch, or listen on unapproved devices. You can’t modify or repair the devices you use. There might be good reasons to give up those rights, like cheap, unlimited access to content everywhere. But consumers are poorly informed about the disparities between ownership and licensing, and unconscious that they sacrifice stability and permanence too. As an answer, blockchains offer an immutable, decentralized record of digital belongings with clear ownership rules. It stamps private identities on digital assets, which can therefore be transferred, sold, and delegated easily like any physical good.

The proposition of the blockchain started with Bitcoin in 2008 with the intent to offer an alternative to the central-bank-controlled monetary system, after the global economic crises around 2008. The blockchain used crypto token assets to proactively incentivize desired user behavior and later expanded from cryptocurrencies to general-purpose business areas. Smart contracts have been popularized through the Ethereum blockchain since around 2016, as the blockchain is arguably a perfect infrastructure that provides a transparent and traceable platform allowing parties to perform trust-free transactions with each other without intermediaries. In the following, the meaning of crypto tokens evolved from a digital currency to representing any tradable asset such as movie tickets, loyalty points, company shares, or software licenses, under the Non-Fungible Token format. Despite all the ongoing blockchain developers’ efforts, many believe that our current understanding of blockchain is pre-mature and that there is a lack of knowledge on where blockchain technology can provide the pre-mentioned societal effects. NFTs are arguably one of the most under-exploited potentials of blockchain technology that misled its digital ownership model to a flash in the pan of internet hype.

What’s wrong with NFTs?

The public attention towards NFTs exploded in 2021 when their market experienced record sales. Academic studies performed data analysis on 6.1 million trades of 4.7 million NFTs of the Ethereum and WAX blockchains between June 23, 2017, and April 27, 2021, and revealed a better statistical understanding of the NFT market. Historically the NFT market volume is dominated by art, which makes them a good vehicle to store value for specific niche markets, but art NFT transactions represent only 10% of global exchanges. Like art in general, art NFTs are bought by fans or investors which will keep their NFT longer instead of trying to swap it fast. The most exchanged NFTs belong to the games and collectibles for which NFTs were revealed to be poor speculative assets: the digital abundance of NFTs in games for example led to a substantial decrease in their value. The average price of NFTs is 15 USD, and the top 1% most expensive average at 1500 USD. Utility NFTs are the category with the highest top 1% average sale at 12,000 USD. Another insight is that even if NFT prices are driven by cryptocurrency values, NFTs can have their own speculative bubble, hardly predictable, and therefore highly dependent on hype cycles. As a consequence, a concern raised by that dependency on hype is an increased phenomenon of wash trading, where the same entity sells and buys the same financial instrument, giving a fake appearance of a market dynamic.

A network analysis of NFT trades revealed a highly centralized NFT market. Crypto traders specializing in NFTs usually form tight clusters of exchange: the top 10% of traders perform 85% of all transactions, and trade 97% of all assets. Traders specialize in a few collections that feature visually homogeneous objects. They perform at least 73% of their transactions in their top collection while 82% of their top two collections. Traders usually specialize in a collection and tend to buy and sell NFTs with other traders specialized in the same collection. As a result, the top 10% of buyer/seller pairs perform 90% of all transactions. The least we can say is that the promise of decentralization of capital, knowledge, and power isn’t achieved yet through NFTs.

How could we make NFTs better?

The embedded creator royalties model is sometimes questioned in the long term since rational investors tend to extract the royalty from their speculation at the purchase. The resale royalty rate will be viewed as a tax (a transaction cost) on future profits from the secondary sale of the NFT, and could potentially drag on resales as potential buyers and sellers may balk at this tax. In practice, NFT owners have the capability to move their NFT from the original minting platform’s architecture to an off-platform wallet and then sell the NFT on a marketplace platform that does not use the original minting platform’s architecture and smart contract protocols. Yet the embedded creator royalties have more than one rational advantage, and shouldn’t be overlooked by investors as a simple tax on speculative revenues. Without even speaking of the crucial role played by creators, without whom the NFT technology couldn’t exist and grow, there are at least three reasons to reinforce embedded royalties at a smart-contract level, for the soundness of the whole NFT economy: creator royalties allow risk sharing of future price volatility, creator royalties redistribute future revenues from better-informed speculators or market influencers, and creator royalties allow a distributed source of income through heterogeneous buyers.

Blockchain technology provides means to uniquely identify and protect intellectual property, for example with NFTs to securely store an unfalsifiable asset on a global ledger, but nothing protects NFTs against plagiarism. An approximate pattern-matching approach has been experimented with to protect the rights of NFT creators and NFT owners. While hash techniques can offer protection against immediate copycats of data, they do not offer protection against slightly altered versions of the same data. This means that the problem of uniqueness isn’t handled entirely by NFT technology. For example, a single pixel modification of the transparent layer of an image would generate two different hashes for the exact same image. One proposed NDFA-based approach in order for an NFT to be minted, its associated digital data needs to be verified against plagiarism. After it passes verification, it can be stored in the ledger as minted. This would slow the minting process and has to be improved.

Between the Fungible and Non-Fungible formats, an innovative Semi-Fungible Token has been proposed and experimented with. SFTs offer a more scalable mechanism for token production, whose single smart contracts support an endless number of tokens, whereas FTs and NFTs necessitate the deployment of a new smart contract for each type of token. Since SFTs are fully dependent on a smart contract, in which the original NFT asset is locked, there is no way to avoid fees. Furthermore, the spread of payment to multiple beneficiaries is directly coded in the buying function of the smart contract. There is natively no buying option where the fee is bypassed, and there is no possibility to trade the SFT externally to the original smart contract. An NFT can be redeemed and externalized if a creator or investor wants to trade it with another revenue model. With SFTs, the NFT holder knows for sure that it will cut fees on further transactions, and is free to release this constraint as soon as it releases the full supply on the market. As long as an NFT holder keeps at least one share in the fractionalized NFT, fractional selling is safe from a remodeling of revenue stream or a fee-avoidance strategy. SFTs are more dynamic and can easily be re-assembled, re-fractionalized infinitely to adapt to the market trends, while classic NFTs are stuck in their original protocol.

A peer-to-peer sharing system for digital properties

Around the world, companies such as Airbnb, or Uber, have created platforms for putting unused assets to work. Owners of cars, apartments, and even Wi-Fi hotspots have been proposed to grant others access to their assets and generate a yield out of it. Over the years, the sharing economy giants turned into matchmaking platforms where middlemen aggregate all the offers for shared items on a market, take fees for making matches, and capture everyone’s data in the process, to potentially monetize their proprietary position of a specific exchange market. Such p2p businesses tend to become more valuable as their networks grow, which creates a winner-take-all environment ending up with monopolies whose all users depend. The peer-to-peer platforms usually struggle in the beginning as they fight for critical mass, often enticing users with special benefits or cut-rate commissions, and later do the opposite, once they’ve attained market dominance, by raising rates unexpectedly and extracting higher commissions when there are no more alternatives on the market.

Connecting all kinds of physical assets like cars, houses, and more, to the blockchain, and using the network infrastructure to rent, sell, share, or swap them in a peer-to-peer fashion would mean creating a universal sharing network with the potential to become a potent source for adding use value to cities. Compared to the web2 sharing economy giants, the web3 iteration will depend less on the middleman platform to perform p2p transactions but instead will rely directly on a common transparent infrastructure. The fees will be more predictable and fixed by a smart contract, the roles of users and providers will be better framed by an incentive system aiming to use the sharing network accordingly to the best interest of the whole ecosystem, and data privacy will be better respected.

3. A strategic approach to Blockchain Cities

Urban developers consider the city being a practical societal level, combining both localness and a scalable variety of human clusters, with a potential feedback control on social engineering. The demographic explosion is responsible for rapid urbanization worldwide and rises multiple global challenges: traffic congestion, pollution, non-renewable resource draining, and an increase in social inequality. Numerous cities around the world are launching blockchain initiatives as part of the overall efforts toward shaping a better urban future. Researchers started to advocate the notion of ‘‘blockchain cities’’ as the next wave of urban innovation that could solve the urbanization challenges.

Blockchain technology as a digital innovation is conceptually close to the key information and communications technologies underlying cities. Therefore blockchain cities can easily relate to what has been studied for three decades under the generic term Smart City, and Blockchain research can benefit from the background of three decades of sustainable and smart-city research frameworks. Smart cities are commonly assessed based on prior experiences with sustainability and quality of life, with a significant addition of modern technological components. The blockchain is arguably a perfect infrastructure for a city's automation as it provides a transparent and traceable platform that allows parties to perform trust-free transactions through smart contracts without intermediaries. In permissionless blockchains, the crypto token models create opportunities for economic alignment, shared interest, and coordination between distributed and trustless individuals. Token holders on the blockchain naturally have a vested interest in the success of the specific crypto token and its underlying blockchain infrastructure that supports its utility or security value. The Blockchain propositions for cities could be broken down into two categories of blockchain utility:

• using blockchain to improve the trust, transparency, and control of existing city processes
• using blockchain to experiment with new forms of ownership and governance.

Blockchain for Smart and Sustainable Cities

Blockchain cities can apply the usual smart city categories to classify their early use cases into existing urban innovation categories: governance, economy, transportation, energy, construction, and sustainability.

Governance:
- a system that stamps government decisions on the blockchain to keep an immutable and transparent record verifiable at any time.
- a system for businesses to share information with the government while ensuring confidentiality and avoiding liability.
- a document-sharing system for government agencies allowing direct exchanges with access control.
- an e-voting system ensuring anonymity, privacy, and transparency.
- a taxation system for the tax authority to monitor value-added-tax invoices and keep an immutable record of the taxable transactions.
- a citizen participatory standardization system where citizens submit their urban needs that will be prioritized by a consensus mechanism for the authorities to draft policies, and citizens to vote on their resolution.

Economy:
- a decentralized social manufacturing platform where prosumers publish service demands and manufacturers satisfy them.
- a system to record and manage product ownership leveraging the post-supply chain consumer to detect the source of counterfeit goods.
- automated blockchain records of vending machines, so users can get the current state of the system.
- a machine-to-machine payment system composed of a smart cable and a smart socket to pay for electricity without human interaction.
- a smart door lock verifying the authenticity of an entering code and recording any door control transactions on the blockchain.
- a system for sharing any kind of everyday tangible object, enabling peer users to rent devices without disclosure of any personal information.
- a peer-to-peer market for leftover foreign currency exchange that could bring leftover foreign currency back into circulation.
- a citizen broadband radio service that reduces operational costs, introduces flexibility and scalability into spectrum regulation, and allows new entrants to access local spectrum based on their needs.
- a social relations-based production model, where participants contribute to a common effort, evaluate each other’s contribution and achieve decentralized consensus on the produced value.

Transportation:
- cargo tracking capability and various supply chain management tasks.
- a distributed transport management system for vehicles to share their resources and create a network in which they can produce value-added services, such as gas refill and ride-sharing.
- a decentralized security credential management system to issue certificates to trusted vehicles and revoke certificates of misbehaving ones without the need for centralized trusting authority.
- a dynamic key management system for heterogeneous vehicles.
- a reputation system where vehicles receive messages on observations of the traffic environments. The public ratings represent the consensus of the crowds on each vehicle’s reputation.
- a blockchain-based security architecture to perform over-the-air updates for smart vehicles, or to securely distribute the latest software to service centers for them to be installed on a vehicle locally.
- a blockchain-based financial system to incentivize cycling by collecting cyclists’ data and monetizing their commuting habits.

Energy:
- a monitoring system to help consumers understand their electricity consumption and be sure that data cannot be artificially manipulated.
- a peer-to-peer energy trading system between producer-consumers of electricity from rooftop solar panels.
- an optimal power flow model for scheduling a mix of batteries, shapable and deferrable loads on an electricity distribution network.
- a system regulating energy production and distribution, giving specific attention to discouraging the production of non-renewable energy.
- an energy system using energy traces of building datasets to manage the energy allocation from the demand side of the grid.
- a continuous double auction, which matches buyers and sellers immediately upon the detection of compatible bids.
- the Brooklyn microgrid energy market which serves as a backup that can be decoupled from the traditional grid in case of a power outage.
- a system executing the recharges of autonomous electric vehicles automatically meeting the requirements of latency, security, and cost.
- a protocol that allows electric vehicles to find the cheapest charging station within a region and preserve the privacy of the electric vehicle.

Construction:
- an information-sharing system to improve trust relations between clients, contractors, subcontractors, and suppliers.
- a scenario that includes notarization applications to eliminate the verification time of construction documents’ authenticity, facilitate automated procurement and payment, and improve transparency and traceability of construction supply chains.
- multi-party automated performance-based payment upon construction completion, integrated with BIM and sensor-based remote monitoring.
- a syndication platform enabling democratized delegation of authorization in multiple administrative domains.

Sustainability:
- a system encouraging the engagement of urban citizens in monitoring environmental quality to promote a greater awareness of city health.
- a monitoring system for the supply chain of sand resources from mining to trading to prevent illegal sand mining.
- an emission trading system for the fashion industry to reduce emissions at the key steps of clothing making.
- a reputation-based mechanism to encourage the participants to adopt a long-term solution in emission reduction.
- a blockchain-based gaming platform engaging users in diminishing water and energy consumption in respected data privacy.

My personal experience on Blockchain Cities uses cases:

I’ve been engaged in various urban innovation projects personally since 2011 and I can see multiple ideas that echo previous experiments I conducted over the years. I will review the ones I’ve been the most invested in, and share my personal experience here before presenting you my proposition of a strategic approach for Blockchain Cities.

I spent a lot of effort into various experiences of citizen engagement, starting with a neighborhood forum called “Immobilier Participatif” in 2011, which led to the development of a FabLab in 2013 dedicated to DIY urban innovation, then organizing a monthly open innovation meetup in my hometown in 2015 to showcase the solutions made up by local inhabitants to improve their cities, and later conducting academic research between 2018 to 2021 for my Ph.D. thesis about “Citizen engagement in SmartCity”. My feedback here is that the engagement of citizens and stakeholders in collaborative urban governance is deeply political in nature. One significant contribution of mine in 2016 was a system for citizens to submit their urban needs to local authorities that were based on a 3D map of my hometown used as a digital interface for citizen participation in decision-making of local urban developments, which granted me a Youth Trophy in the economic category. At that point, I reached good support from the local press and technological schools, even from the public sector. I’ve been invited to speak to various public events as an evangelist for the adoption of tech in the local administration but none of this ever reached financial support. I didn’t succeed in fundraising from the private sector which considered me a political innovator and didn’t collect a grant from the public sector as they considered me an aspiring lucrative business. My business model was depending on finding a consensus among various stakeholders to deploy urban innovation in the city and was conditioned to citizen adoption, conditioned to deploying a wide educational plan and incentive mechanism for average citizens to use my technology tools.

A system to record and manage product ownership leveraging the post-supply chain consumer, and a system for sharing any kind of everyday tangible object, are two similar propositions of the blockchain cities, which reminds me a lot of my years-long promotion of participatory housing models and local barter networks, which I evolved through different research and initiatives ending up with the creation of a non-profit association to synchronize inhabitants in their collaborative housing projects in 2016. I learned a lot from travels in Germany, and Denmark, where the interest in organizing social life through the management of common housing is more developed than in the south of Europe, and the fact that my research ended up in a non-profit model speaks for itself: I didn’t manage to build a profitable business out of these experiences. One of my partners at that time HabFab structured itself as a cooperative urban developer, but last time I checked they never paid themselves, but were instead a group of architects working as freelance on the side, and experimenting with co-living together. The open-source philosophy applied to housing and urban infrastructure is such a dedication and an effort from participants, that is it not matching with the stability, comfort, and security expected by the average inhabitant when they spend a significant amount of money to buy a house. Thus the DIY sharing economy I met was a mix of utopian politics and low-income populations whose priority isn’t to become financially sustainable or profitable, but instead to unlock access to a public grant.

Speaking of a social relations-based production model, where participants contribute to a common effort, evaluate each other’s contribution, and achieve decentralized consensus on the produced value. This proposition is quite close to the working process that I have been using in all my startup projects, I even tried to develop the open-source software BetterMeans for the French-speaking market between 2013 and 2014. And so far I ended up organizing a low-key consensus where team members can join me on projects, invest their skills and time to push an aspiring startup forward, collect credits, and leave when they want to a more stable position in a regular company or personal projects. They can swap their shares for cash at a standard market price, if there’s cash liquidity in the project, keep it here and wait for a better time to sell, or follow up on the long term as a share owner. I like the organizational innovation behind it, and blockchain accountability would surely make it most secure and scalable while tracking the contributions of each team member. But there are a lot of existing software companies providing Project Management Systems, from Trello to Asana, Hubspot, and others, and this endeavor is out of my interest.

Considering, on one hand, my experience of more than a decade in urban innovation projects, I will choose now to go for the simplest, bordered, sellable product, which can be useful and profitable from the very first prototype to the biggest scaling up I can imagine. Considering, on the other hand, the essential definition of the Partage app that I built this year: “a platform where owners can lock their utility NFTs in a vault, and release a series of tokens representing shares of them”, I will start working on a blockchain-controlled smart lock. This seems to me like the best idea to close the bridge between digital and physical for Utility NFTs, and a great strategy to participate in adding use value to the urban infrastructure of any city.

A Blockchain-controlled Smart Lock

In recent times, digital locks have become increasingly popular for securing homes and valuables. Either for shared utilities like Airbnb housing, hotels, car, or scooters and for private properties like Tesla or BMW cars that open directly when you get close to them with your phone. You can find a bunch of them on the market with different designs and features for an average price between 150 and 300 USD. However, these locks revealed some vulnerabilities, which Blockchain technology could solve. Blockchain-controlled smart locks can be locked or unlocked based on the state of a variable that is embedded in a smart contract. The hardware lock will be controlled by the smart contract, and inherit the security and the programmability of the Partage Protocol. It will be used to securely share access to a property which can be a housing unit, a car, a boat, or some sports equipment. Using a smart contract as the underlying layer to decide whether to lock or unlock adds versatility and security to the standard smart lock concept. The almost unlimited programmability and the fact that you can easily link any kind of payment method open many use cases. For example, you could program a lock to open as a result of “rent being paid,” or have a high-security multisign lock that requires a certain number of different addresses to approve the state change. In short Blockchain-controlled locks are much more secure than traditional smart devices, with the same digital benefits, and more flexibility.

I want to remotely operate my Smart Lock, so I can see three options so far:
- One option would be to hold the status of the lock in the blockchain. By doing so, only the deployer account of the smart contract will be able to execute the status update and operate the smart lock. The status of the lock will be updated by performing a valid transaction, and the smart contract will send a token to a local server that will run a script to open the door. This is the closest solution to current smart door solutions, but it might cause different issues: the delay of door openly, and the gas fees every time you open the door. Furthermore, conditioning the door opening to payment doesn’t give the user a right to multiple opens/closes over a certain time period. I don’t think that this solution will work conveniently for the use case that I have in mind.
- Another option would be that the smart contract generates a random 4-digit code that will open a keypad lock for some time. So you would select your desired use time on a calendar, either 1 hour or a few days, send a payment to the owner’s address, and receive a 4-digit code which will be valid during your time window. The code will become obsolete when your credit is over, and a new code will be generated randomly for the next buyer. This solution is pretty convenient for the owner: if the buyer doesn’t show up it makes no harm: the door remains locked and no one knows the temporary code, and if someone damages the property, then you know its identity for sure because only one unique user was able to open the property at the time it has been damaged. I am uncertain how to handle it still, because a smart contract response is usually public, and we can’t allow that anyone watching the blockchain activity could read the code generated. even though no one should know where is the property located, and when is the time window when the code will be valid, this is not an ideal solution.
- Finally, a third solution to explore would be that the smart contract sends a token like an NFT for example that will be scanned at the entrance to open the lock, or that will generate a QR code that will be scanned to open the door. This is surely the most Blockchain-centric engineering, and probably the most marketable solution, but I don’t think that such door scanners are standard on the market, thus it will be more expensive and complicated to build the first prototypes, and later to clone that solution.

I think that I will dig into the second option. The keypad lock is very mainstream, available at entry costs everywhere, quite a small size too compared to regular door handles, and it can be easily implemented on various locks: doors, vaults, gates, and even cars, and scooters….

Bibliographical references

• The Right to the City, Henri Lefebvre, 1968
• The right to infrastructure: a prototype for open source urbanism, Alberto Corsin Gimenez, 2014
• The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy, Aaron Perzanowski, Jason Schultz (2016)
• Enabling IoT and the Universal Sharing Network, Alan Majer (2017)
• Mapping the NFT revolution: market trends, trade networks, and visual features, Matthieu Nadini, Laura Alessandretti, Flavio Di Giacinto, Mauro Martino, Luca Maria Aiello, Andrea Baronchelli (2021)
• A New High-Performance Approach to Approximate Pattern-Matching for Plagiarism Detection in Blockchain-Based Non-Fungible Tokens, Ciprian Pungilă, Darius Galis, Viorel Negru (2022)
• Economics of NFTs: The Value of Creator Royalties, Brett Hemenway Falk, Gerry Tsoukalas, Niuniu Zhang (2022)
• Blockchain for Cities — A Systematic Literature Review, Charles Shen, Fenioski Pena-Mora (2018)