CITY-ZEN APPLICATION USING BLOCKCHAIN
Shiv Palak
Pandeyshiv18@gmail.com
Disha Sarna
dishasarna2001@gmail.com
Department of Information Technology, Guru Tegh Bahadur Institute of Technology, Rajouri Garden,
New Delhi, Delhi – 110064, India
Abstract
To date, there is a paucity of information on the
discrepancies of awareness and attitudes towards
government policies and welfare schemes.
Due to the number of policies and schemes being
so high a common citizen is not able to keep a track
of all of the opportunities and facilitates.
CITY-Zen is a mobile app to access central and
state government services. The app is created for
all citizens of India and offers government services
available to the general public online and around
the clock.
PURPOSE: The purpose of this study are to
investigate the discrepancies in the awareness and
attitudes toward advance welfare schemes initiated
by the government all around the year. A total of
1000 people including urban and non-urban
sections of the society were surveyed for the same.
In this paper, we study and compare the awareness
parameter with the application of Block chain
Technology and smart contracts. One upon reading
this will get to know about the effect of block chain
technology utilization on this field.
Due to the centralized nature and maintain the vast
amount of data block chain has to implemented
because a crash or failure of the database would
affect all records. With the implementation of
Block chain, a malicious or unwitting actor could
be prevented from altering records in the database
and only an authorized party could enter records
into the database.
There is no doubt in the fact that blockchain
technology plays an important role in developing
palakkarn15@gmail.com
Dolly Mehra
dollymehra204@gmail.com
trust with the stakeholder of the supply chain. In
the end, the research paper has also given some
considerations on the implications that are positive
as well as the potential of the blockchain in the
field of collaboration and integration.
The blockchain technology that Satoshi Nakamoto
has proposed for financial transactions can be used
to solve the problems of trust in centralized systems
and the subversion and alteration that these
transactions may be exposed to. Blockchain-based
systems have shown their effectiveness and ability
to solve most security problems related to
exchanging systems’ transactions. Hence, A
decentralized system for exchanging digital
documents, using Ethereum blockchain and
Interplanetary File System (IPFS), has been
proposed to overcome the problems of using
trusted third parties in exchanging digital
documents.
The proposed system provides immutable and
irreversible logs of the process of sending and
receiving documents. In this framework, all
registered users can encrypt the documents using
the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)
Algorithm, send, and receive documents using the
Ethereum Blockchain’s smart contract.
The smart contract used in the Ethereum
blockchain was written in the Solidity
programming language, and the android application
that was needed to interact with the blockchain was
built using Java,JDBC and other different libraries
like web3 and MongoDB. Finally, the model’s
results indicated that the users of any age and
section were easily aware of the current schemes
and according to their eligibility criteria, they could
easily apply online using our application which at
the same time 1-stop secure solution for impacting
an increased user experience and a good usage of
all the beneficial schemes, thereby being a potential
citizen of the nation. Also, the model has satisfied
the three main security requirements which are
confidentiality, integrity, and availability by using
the suitable countermeasure for each one of them.
KEYWORDS-: AES, Smart contract, Ethereum
blockchain, Solidity, IPFS
I. INTRODUCTION
Blockchain is a “distributed database or public ledger of
all digital events that have been executed and shared
among participating parties using a peer to peer (P2P)
network” [4].
It was proposed in 2008 by S. Nakamoto to solve the
problem of double-spending without the need of a trusted
third party by introducing new cryptocurrency [1]. Each
transaction in the public ledger is hashed with the
network timestamps forming a record that cannot be
changed.
When a transaction occurred, it will be validated and
verified by some nodes in the network which means that
the sender has to sign the transaction with his/her digital
signature, and if it is a valid transaction it will be added
in a block in the blockchain [4].
II.
Beyond online cryptocurrencies, blockchain has potential
uses in many other fields such as; education, healthcare,
IoT and decentralized systems for digital documents. The
proposed system will adopt blockchain adopt blockchain
to overcome the privacy issue in how users’ data is being
shared among third party entities.
Meanwhile, the existing systems are considered to be a
centralized system, thus a single point of failure may lead
the system to fall to pieces. Furthermore, blockchain
technology can preserve the integrity and provide an end
to end network for exchanging documents with the use of
IPFS, which is a peer to peer decentralized file storage
system, to avoid the need of storing the blockchain in
servers. The main objectives of this work can be
represented as the following: first Provide a Tamperproof
platform for exchanging digital documents. Second,
provide an end to end network for exchanging digital
documents.
A) CURRENT SCENARIOS
Due to the large number of Government Policies and
schemes introduced people are not able to keep a track,
get the proper knowledge and the major of all it is not
able to reach the intended audience.
 Indian Government, at all levels, announces Welfare
Schemes for a cross section of the society from time to
time. These schemes could be either Central, State
specific or a joint collaboration between the Centre and
the States
 In the 2022 Union budget of India, there are 740
central sector (CS) schemes. and 65 (+7+) centrally
sponsored schemes (CSSs). From 131 CSSs in February
2021, the union government aimed to
restructure/revamp/rationalize these by the next year.
 To blame the government alone is unfair. An
information drought occurs despite the government’s best
efforts in creating awareness through radio, TV, print or
online media.
 Unfortunately, these communication efforts often do
not reach rural areas. For example, in Uttar Pradesh, one
of India’s poorest states, between 2013 and 2017, there
was more than US $1.3 billion in unspent funds for
minority welfare schemes. In Karnataka, although US
$735 million was collected to be used as welfare schemes
for workers, only 2.44 percent was used due to lack of
awareness of such programs.
II. BACKGROUND
In this section, the operation of the blockchain will be
explained by illustrating how BitCoin works since it was
the first application that uses the blockchain. In the
Bitcoin system, digital signatures are used to protect
transactions. Signed transactions are then verified and
broadcasted to the nodes in the BitCoin network. Thus,
Blockchain is used in the BitCoin network to agree on
the sequence of transactions as each block in the
blockchain includes the hash of the previous block as
seen in Figure 1. If two blocks from different nodes
Fig. 1. Blockchain structure.
were created at the same time, the first block’s puzzle to
be answered it will be add to the blockchain, these
blocks’ difficult puzzles known as “proof of work”,
which is one of the consensus algorithms used in
blockchain. The first node to solve the puzzle broadcasts
the new blockchain to all nodes in the network. Those
nodes who solve these mathematical problems are called
“miner nodes”. This approach makes the blockchain safe
against fraudulent transactions because if the attacker
changes one block in the blockchain this will result in
changing the hash of that block and all blocks after that
block needed to be changed too thus, the attacker will
end up changing the rest of blocks.
Blockchain refuses two blocks with the same hash. Proof
of work is used in blockchain to solve the problem of
double- spending and to make all nodes in the network
have the same blockchain. There are many algorithms
other than proof of work, these algorithms are called
consensus algorithms.
Fig. 2. Blockchain network protocol
III. RELATED WORK
Currently, Blockchain is one of the most secure data
protection technologies. The rapid advancements in
digital technology have also introduced new challenges
around data security. Organizations need to secure their
data by implementing strong authentication and
cryptography key vaulting mechanisms. Blockchain
technology is functioning enough to address the challenge
of how to secure the data and prevent malicious cyber-
attacks. Reports say the global blockchain technology
market is likely to be around $20 billion by 2024.
Blockchain has been revolutionary, is used in many
industries like healthcare, finance, sports and more.
This section will review the previous work on both
digital databases security, and blockchain applications.
Because of the difficulties of sharing information by
meeting in a face-toface manner, information exchanges
are moving towards online environments. Therefore, the
trust that was in a faceto-face manner must be maintained
in the online environment and such systems must build
properly. [3] had described the key attribute for sharing
information mechanisms, and they explained how to
establish and maintain trust as a fundamental part of
information exchange. In order to maintain these
systems, information must be classified, protected, and
Anonymity must be preserved. In this work, they focused
on the trust in online systems for sharing information, but
these systems may be hacked, corrupted or even charge a
high amount of money for ensuring that the
communication channel is secured enough.
Blockchain
Due to the nature of IoT, privacy and security remain a
major challenge. [5] presented a case study of applying
blockchain on smart homes for preserving privacy and
security with minimal overhead in terms of energy
consumption, traffic, and processing time. The authors
divided the smart home into four components;
Transactions, Local blockchain, home miner, and local
storage. The transaction component is responsible for
accessing and storing transactions issued by devices. The
blockchain (BC) used in the case study is a local private
blockchain. The transactions of each device are chained
together as an unchangeable BC ledger, each block
contains two headers, block header and policy header,
and a number of transactions. The proposed framework
achieves the security requirements; Confidentiality has
been preserved by using symmetric encryption. While
employing hash functions, integrity can be assured. And
by limiting acceptable transactions availability can be
achieved. Finally, User control data can be obtained by
logging transactions in the local blockchain. Their main
limitation was the energy consumption in different traffic
flows were expensive in comparison with the base idea
for the smart home. [9] have proposed a new data-sharing
scheme by combining decentralized storage
interplanetary file system (IPFS), Ethereum blockchain
and the attribute-based encryption (ABE) technology.
The system has two main users; the data owner, who
owns the data and wants to share it with others, and the
data user, who wants to get access to the data shared by
the data owner. The scheme archives fine-grained access
by giving the capabilities to the data owner to distribute
the secret key for data users and encrypt the shared data
by specifying access policy. The system framework
consists of the following steps; User registration, this
step is accessible by the data owner, which takes the
master key and the attributes set of the new user as input
and outputs the user secret key that will be encrypted in
AES algorithm and embedded in the Ethereum
blockchain. The data owner selects a keyword set from
the file and selects the AES key from the key space,
encrypts the file and upload the cypher text to IPFS.
After that, the public parameter and the key that has been
used in encrypting the file and the location of the
ciphertext, which is encrypted using the AES key, along
with the access policy will be encrypted by the data
owner using ABE Algorithm and return it as an
encrypted result. In the decryption step, if the data user’s
attribute meets the access policy, the data user decrypts
the result in the previous step and gets the AES key and
uses it to decrypt the file location, download it and
decrypt it again using the same key. However, the system
doesn’t provide functions for the users’ attribute
rescission and access policy update. [4] have presented
blockchain application and one of them was the notary
public which implements the blockchain to obtain the
documents’ certificates that can be used to prove the
ownership, integrity, and existence of such documents. It
can also provide proof of publication using cryptographic
file hashes in the blockchain that leads to a new level of
notary timestamping. Using blockchain can minimize the
need for notarization fees and avoid the need for using
centralized systems which are vulnerable to a single point
of failure.
A. Blockchain databases
Any data structure used to store information can be
considered a database. Blockchain technology, at its core,
is no more than a ledger to store information about
transactions.
To that point, blockchains can be considered databases.
Blockchain databases bring the concept one step further
and combine the best of both worlds. In this article, you
will learn the benefits of blockchain databases and how
they can be used in your IT infrastructure.
To understand what blockchain databases are, it is crucial
to understand what a blockchain is. Blockchains are used
as a digital ledger to store transactional information. The
data is stored as signed blocks, which link to each other,
creating a chain of immutable interconnected data
entries.

Fig. 3. Blockchain network blocks

To sign a new block, a node needs to find an SHA-256

signature that matches specific criteria. To do so, it will
use the nonce field to brute force possible solutions. Any
new block needs to be validated with the majority of the
validation nodes forming the blockchain. Once the block
has been validated, it is added to all the nodes of the
blockchain. This way of validating new blocks is called
the proof of work (PoW) and was very prevalent in the
early days of blockchain technology. Nowadays, other
methods for validating have emerged, such as the proof
of stake (PoS).
If any of the information in the data inside the block is
altered, the signature becomes invalid. To make the block
valid again, this signature would need to change. To
ensure that the following blocks still work, a new
signature would also need to be generated for each of
them. Even if a node could regenerate those signatures,
the changes would need to be accepted by a majority of
the nodes hosting the blockchain.
For these reasons, blockchains are immutable. No
information that is included in the data of the blocks can
be changed. They are also managed by a set of
decentralized nodes, removing the need for a central
authority to control all the transactions. This
immutability is why blockchains have gained popularity
in industries such as finances and real estate.
The blockchain structure makes it virtually impossible
for someone to change the data without breaking the
chain.
Data can only be read or added to the blockchain. The
verification methods to ensure data integrity can slow
down the querying and general performance of a
blockchain. Blockchains can be fully decentralized and
not rely on any central authority.
Fig. 4.
IV. PROPOSED MODEL
A. Model Overview
A decentralized application for accessing the distributed
database will be implemented using the Ethereum
blockchain, smart contract and solidity. The main
objective is to present a p2p network for exchanging
information and retrieving respective welfare scheme
data according to and provide logs to keep track of
transactions that take place to ensure both; integrity and
security.
For an effective solution and according to the Digital
India Mission a Mobile App is required that over rules
the traditional way of filling a lot of entry details and
providing less info.
 CITY-Zen is a simple Android java bases application
which when started prompts the user for language he is
comfortable in as a large amount of audience is not well
educated in rural areas.
 Age City and gender would be the first 3 requirements
to be filled so that data can be selected according to the
needs of the user as a Resident of Mumbai Male 21-year-
old would not apply for his minor account or Delhi girl
child scheme.
 Data Fetched from Block Chain Database would be
managed and divided into 3 tabs with relevant
information about the policy on 1st eligibility and
required documents on 2nd and a 24x7 online working
links on 3rd for the simplicity of all users.
 Login for users will also be provided for better and
enhanced experience.
The proposed framework is implemented using the
solidity programming language.
The proposed framework has four main functionalities:
1) The ability to login into the application.
2) Fetching via keywords from the blockchain based
database.
 3) The ability to track and verify the scheme links and
documents.
4) Maintaining the three security standards:
Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability. Building a website
application became a necessity to be able to communicate
with the blockchain.
The website is built in with Android Java,JDBC and
other tools which is an effective and declarative
MongoDB library that allows you to deal with user
interface (IU) components as small pieces called
“components” [2]. The following de- pendency will be
used in building and connecting the website with the
Ethereum blockchain: Truffle development environment
that can be used to compile and deploy the smart contract
and inject them into the application, it acts as a front-
end.
Fig. 5. ER Diagram of the proposed application
B. Model Design
Ethereum blockchain Smart contracts are used to govern
the queries that have been executed in the blockchain.
Smart contract’s code is considered to be the code
deployed to the blockchain. In the proposed model the
smart contract will be used to control the process of
sending and receiving documents. It will also be
responsible for adding a new member to the system.
Fig. 6. Data Flow Diagram of City-Zen App
IV. CHALLENGES & RECENT ADVANCES
Despite the great potential of blockchain, it faces
numerous challenges, which limit the wide usage of
blockchain. We enumerate some major challenges and
recent advances as follows.
A. Scalability:
With the amount of transactions increasing day by day,
the blockchain becomes bulky. Each node has to store all
transactions to validate them on the blockchain because
they have to check if the source of the current transaction
is unspent or not. Besides, due to the original restriction
of block size and the time interval used to generate a new
block, the Bitcoin blockchain can only process nearly 7
transactions per second, which cannot fulfill the
requirement of processing millions of transactions in
real-time fashion. Meanwhile, as the capacity of blocks is
very small, many small transactions might be delayed
since miners prefer those transactions with high
transaction fee. There are a number of efforts proposed to
address the scalability problem of blockchain.
B. Privacy Leakage
Blockchain can preserve a certain amount of privacy
through the public key and private key. Users transact
with their private key and public key without any real
identity exposure. However, it is shown in [40], [5] that
blockchain cannot guarantee the transactional privacy
since the values of all transactions and balances for each
public key are publicly visible. Besides, the recent study
[41] has shown that a user’s Bitcoin transactions can be
linked to reveal user’s information. Moreover, Biryukov
et al. [11] presented a method to link user pseudonyms to
IP addresses even when users are behind Network
Address Translation (NAT) or firewalls. In [11], each
client can be uniquely identified by a set of nodes it
connects to.
VI CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
In order to query the blockchain or add new blocks to the
chain, each block that is created must be kept in a single
location. The cloud-based database-as-a-service from
MongoDB, MongoDB Atlas, is ideal for storing a
blockchain ledger.
According to the survey undertaken, more than half of
the university students (59.89%) had never heard of
many welfare govt. schemes before; there were
significant differences in the awareness regarding this
between urban and rural-peers including people from
children to adults to senior citizens.
But a re-survey conducted after the app usage suggested
that the people are getting more engaged with the
government schemes and are also grabbing the benefits
of schemes at the intended time itself, also the app has
provided ease to all the beneficiaries.
Fig. 7. Statistics after development of this model

Fig. 8. Welfare Schemes Initial Survey
From the above data it can be concluded that people were
only aware about the schemes that are spoken about and
people had no knowledge about many other schemes that
are very basic and useful for the people.
Our application will be a fully build one stop platform
for the people of all categories, age and gender, where
people can get information about the basic schemes that
the government has for them and can also apply for the
same.
Fig. 9. Analysis of Schemes Awareness
The idea of blockchain can also aid in the management of
enormous amounts of data, which can be highly
beneficial for government organizations. The adoption of
Blockchain will result in an efficient data management
system with the potential to enhance how these entities
operate.
Blockchain engineers and specialists are in short supply
on the job market, despite the technology being at the
height of its popularity. Investing in Blockchain
technology now will benefit you in the long run. The
time to become familiar with Blockchain technology is
now.
The scope of blockchain technology will expand in the
coming years and the merits of its application will lure
businesses and organizations globally for investing in it.
Although blockchain technology is in its nascent stage,
its future is poised to see adoption from industries across
the globe.
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