An Empirical Analysis of Running a Bitcoin Minimal Wallet on an IoT Device.

Integrating blockchain with IoT technology is a hot topic in recent years. Some outstanding approaches propose to design new blockchain platforms from scratch to adapt them to the special needs of the resource-constrained devices of the IoT. On the other hand, integrating existing blockchain systems, like Bitcoin or Ethereum, would open the door to extend and use a plethora of already successful applications running on these systems. In this paper, we show the feasibility to interact with the Bitcoin blockchain with an IoT device. To this end, we implement a minimal SPV wallet that we deploy on a microcontroller unit from the STM32F4 family. Then, we empirically study the performance of this minimal wallet analyzing its key functionalities in terms of execution time, memory usage, and network traffic. Beyond demonstrating the feasibility of integrating the most popular blockchain network with the IoT, the results of this experiment show the most demanding operations, which is a necessary first step to construct a wallet optimized for the IoT.