Overcoming Limits of Blockchain for IoT Applications

Blockchain technology allows the implementation of a public ledger securely recording transactions among peers without the need of trusted third parties. For both researchers and industry, IoT appears a domain in which there would be extraordinary benefits if the features of Blockchain can be exploited. Indeed, the possibility that IoT devices participate in public shared transactions enables a lot of challenging applications. However, there are some aspects that may limit the use of Blockchain in IoT. These are mainly related to the low computational power and storage capabilities of IoT devices. In this paper, we propose an alternative way to implement a public ledger overcoming the above drawbacks, thus appearing more suitable to IoT applications. The proposed protocol leverages the popular social network Twitter and works by building a meshed chain of tweets to ensure transaction security. Importantly, Twitter does not play neither the role of trusted third party nor the role of ledger provider.