BlockV: A Blockchain Enabled Peer-Peer Ride Sharing Service

Abstract

Today's ride sharing is a centralized trust based system where users trust the service providers for the ride set up, tracking, cancellation, fare calculation etc. Any malicious activity in the centralized server based system or a malicious driver or a malicious rider destroys the fairness involved in the ride and causes inconvenience to the parties. After the completion of the ride, the drivers are rated by the riders. There are possibilities that, a malicious rider can claim the refund with a fake complain and give the driver poor rating intentionally or a malicious driver follows a longer path unnecessarily and charges the rider more. Current system is not capable of deciding the correctness of the objections raised by either parties regarding the ride and provides a biased outcome of each objections as per the centralized company's marketing strategies. In this context, we present BlockV, a blockchain enabled anonymous permissionless solution to ensure end to end fairness of the ride. The creation, completion, dissatisfaction or abortion of any ride will be written in the blockchain ledger, hence will be available to all participants in the peer to peer network. This simultaneously ensures the fairness in maintenance of the inbuilt reputation system. We have implemented a prototype in Ethereum private network and KOVAN test network and analyzed the security.