The world is transforming from paper or plastic currency towards digital currency. Everyone is trying to benefit from the decentralized system, the anonymity, and lower transaction cost offered by cryptocurrencies. One of the hurdles in the ascension of electric vehicle is its charging and the transaction for charging. In this chapter, a cryptocurrency-based payment framework is formulated for electric vehicle charging to eliminate the third-party involvement as in the plastic currency system. In this payment framework, smart contracts are deployed which would ensure the conditions to be satisfied, like the amount sent by the consumer. Smart contract includes the transfer function that would transfer the amount of ether and set charging time according to the charging rate, amount of ether sent, and power delivered. Overview of the platform prototype of payment is presented to demonstrate the implementation of the framework in the real world. At last, the authors look at the security issues, challenges ahead, and also suggested some of the improvements that could be further done.
TopI. Introduction
The world is looking forward to a transaction mode without involvement of any third party. Cryptocurrency, being a decentralized system (Nakamoto, 2008), is paving this way. It provides security with the advancing blockchain technology and the distributed ledger system. In the sequential chain of blocks, it stores the complete history of transactions. This provides transparency to the system (Bunjaku et al., 2017). With the unique address for each transaction, complete anonymity is relished by companies (Bunjaku et al., 2017), (Lee, 2019).
These advancing features are magnetizing the users (Mahmood, 2021) and the world is moving towards the transformation from the centralized banking system to the decentralized cryptocurrency. At present, the total market value of all kinds of cryptocurrency has crossed USD 200 billion (Xu et al., 2019).
This chapter is aimed at designing a cryptocurrency-based payment framework for charging electric vehicles.
The automated payment for the charging of electric vehicles at charging stations will lead to speedy transactions. The provision of anonymity (Lee, 2019), (Bunjaku et al., 2017) for its users also attracts users, leading to the prosperity of the industry of clean and fuel-independent electric vehicles.
This payment system would be using smart contract (Loi et al., 2016) for the conditions to be fulfilled before the transaction occurs. These conditions would include whether the sender has that amount of digital currency in his account, what amount of charging is going to be done, and may include conditions for different pricing for different time slots.
This smart contract is dealt with solidity (Wöhrer & Zdun, 2018) programming language that enables the user to execute a payable function which would transfer the preset amount from the customer's digital account to the company's account only if all the conditions provided in that function is being fulfilled and there is no any issue.
The charging rate can be done in two ways. In one case, the power for charging being fixed and the amount of ether being paid depends only on the time for which charging is being done. In the second case, the pricing may be according to the energy consumption, for which we have to do interfacing with something which can provide us the energy being consumed.
If the smart contract is linked with some online stuff, the conversion rate of different currencies of the world and the digital currencies is to be made available for customers in a public function of the contract.
For the pricing to be done on the basis of peak hour and early hour, real world time is to be synchronized with the smart contract and pricing for different time slots is to be done.
With this system of transaction for the charging of electric vehicles, we will be enjoying less transaction cost (Huang et al., 2021), elimination of the risk of charge-backs, no third-party involvement and quick transaction. This results in satisfaction for the electric vehicle users. It will lead to getting rid of the dependence on the exhaustible and anti-environment fuel-based vehicles.