Blockchains and smart contracts are an emerging, promising technology, that has received considerable attention. We use the blockchain technology, and in particular Ethereum, to implement a large-scale event-based Internet of Things (IoT) control system. We argue that the distributed nature of the ledger, as well as, Ethereums capability of parallel execution of replicated smart contracts, provide the sought after automation, generality, flexibility, resilience, and high availability. We design a realistic blockchain-based IoT architecture, using existing technologies while by taking into consideration the characteristics and limitations of IoT devices and applications. Furthermore, we leverage blockchains immutability and Ethereums support for custom tokens to build a robust and efficient token-based access control mechanism. Our evaluation shows that our solution is viable and offers significant security and usability advantages.
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