Renting Items on the Blockchain

One of the most amazing things that Blockchain technology enables is frictionless payments. With just a few clicks and almost no hassle, you can send any amount of money to someone (or something) else to pay for a product or service with very low fees and no intermediaries.

When talking about payments, Blockchain technology allows us to do things that would be extremely expensive, difficult to implement or outright impossible to do with “traditional” means.

For example, renting a movie for a few minutes and getting a refund on the minutes you had paid but didn’t use is extremely difficult, if not impossible to implement with credit card payments. What if you wanted to rent a rather inexpensive item for a few minutes? With Paypal or a credit card the commissions imposed by the networks would cost you more than the rental itself.

Renting an item on the Blockchain

I’ve put together a simple contract that other smart contract developers can use to make their own contracts rentable.

Here’s the code and detailed instructions on how to implement it and use it: https://github.com/pabloruiz55/Rentable

A few key features of the contract:

• It’s very easy to implement and configure. The developer only has to add a few lines to his base contract to make it “rentable”.
• The Rentable contract allows to set up a rental price, and minimum / maximum return time to control the item’s availability.
• The account renting the item can do so just by sending ether to the contract and the rental duration will be calculated from that.
• The account renting the item can return it whenever he wants and get a refund on the time (seconds) he had remaining.