Abstract

Cash-less payment via a variety of credit, debit or prepaid cards is pervasive in our interconnected society, but not so ubiquitous in remote rural regions where network connectivity is intermittent. We proposed a cash-less payment scheme for remote villages based on blockchains that allow maintaining a record of verifiable transactions in a distributed manner. We overcome the limitations of intermittent network connectivity by solely relying on blockchain mining nodes in the village for transaction processing and verification. The bank joins as a peer and monitors node behaviors, rewards miners and processes currency exchanges whenever the connectivity is available. We take advantage of the Ethereum network to develop our solution and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system on off-the-shelf computing devices. We emulate a remote village scenario with intermittent network connectivity and show the robustness and reliability of the proposed system.