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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Blockchain
Sec. Smart Contracts
Volume 7 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fbloc.2024.1481339

Blockchain Oracles for Decentralized Agricultural Insurance Using Trusted IoT Data

Provisionally accepted
Manoj T Manoj T 1,2*Krishnamoorthi Makkithaya Krishnamoorthi Makkithaya 1,2*Narendra V G Narendra V G 1,2*Vijaya Murari T Vijaya Murari T 3,4*
  • 1 Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal, India
  • 2 Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, Karnataka, India
  • 3 Nitte Mahalinga Adyanthaya Memorial Institute of Technology, Karkala, Karnataka, India
  • 4 Nitte University, Mangalore, Karnataka, India

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Agricultural insurance is one of the formal and reliable risk management instruments to cope with agrarian risks. Presently, agricultural insurance products rely heavily on centralized systems that lack transparency and traceability, leading to suboptimal risk assessment and delays in payouts. To address these concerns the fintech industry has started to embrace a popular decentralized technology called blockchain. However, blockchain operates as a deterministic and synchronized state system, which means it cannot directly access real-world data for decentralized applications. A mechanism called oracle is required for the trusted access of agricultural risk factor data to smart contracts from external sources such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices, web services and databases. Hence, the present study proposes a blockchain-based AgriInsureDON framework with a privacy-preserving decentralized oracle for risk factor data access from trusted IoT devices for agricultural insurance. Initially, a method for computing the direct reputation score of IoT devices based on behavioral and data reputation is illustrated. Next, a privacy preserved decentralized oracle mechanism is designed and implemented using a masked secret sharing and secure aggregation scheme. Later, we demonstrate the working of weather-indexed insurance contracts based on decentralized oracle. Finally, a performance analysis of smart contract transactions w.r.t average latency, throughput, average CPU utilization and total memory usage is conducted on Ganache and Sepolia test networks. The evaluation results of privacy-protected decentralized oracle and an indexed insurance contract within AgriInsureDON framework confirms that transactions are efficient and scalable to meet the requirements of expedited claim settlement.

    Keywords: Agricultural insurance, Blockchain, Ethereum, IoT, Oracles. Smart Contracts

    Received: 15 Aug 2024; Accepted: 09 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 T, Makkithaya, V G and T. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence:
    Manoj T, Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal, India
    Krishnamoorthi Makkithaya, Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal, India
    Narendra V G, Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal, India
    Vijaya Murari T, Nitte Mahalinga Adyanthaya Memorial Institute of Technology, Karkala, 574110, Karnataka, India

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.