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Introduction

This chapter introduces the integration of blockchain technology with the Internet of

Things to connect everything globally. Industry 5.0 is a new dawn in massive auto-

mated production based on the active collaboration between the creative potential of

people and accurate apparatuses. Internet of Things (IoT) can make environments

smarter, increasingly connected, and more profitable and efficient by connecting

many distributed and ubiquitously available intelligent devices and sensors through

multi-level communication infrastructures. While this should ideally map to a

decentralized hardware and software platform, current solutions are mostly based

on centralized infrastructures, with many disadvantages, e.g., high maintenance

costs, low interoperability, single point of failure, etc. An additional challenge in

supporting decentralization is achieving distributed consensus among autonomous

IoT objects [1–3]. In this view, blockchain represents a promising solution for

enabling a decentralized IoT framework [4–8]. However, due to the heterogeneity,

IoT requires addressing several additional challenges, including ensuring scalability,

interoperability, security, privacy, and efficiency [9].

Soft computing techniques are applied to analyze and classify data or predict

data from various systems—a blockchain shaped as digital transactions occurring

among the participants [10–14]. Blockchain is a peer-to-peer network where all

participating peers maintain identical copies of the distributed ledger. At the same

time, new entries containing information about transactions added to the blockchain

utilizing decentralized consensus among the peers. A blockchain is the amalgama-

tion of cryptography, critical public infrastructure, and economic modeling applied to

peer-to-peer networking and decentralized consensus to achieve distributed database

synchronization from a technological perspective. Besides its ability to digitize trans-

actions smoothly and efficiently, blockchain technology has gone mainstream in

various industries such as finance, insurance, logistics, and agriculture [14–18]. Its

unique capability is to provide “trustless” networks without centralized authorities

so data transacting nodes can reach faster reconciliation [19–23]. As a result, it

enables the flourishing of novel decentralized and fully autonomous applications

[24–29]. Such applications carry new opportunities, but they also introduce signif-

icant challenges for traditional soft computing tools and methodologies that need

to be adapted consequently. For example, the machine learning community is lever-

aging cryptographic techniques such as Multi-Party Computation and Homomorphic

Encryption for privacy-preserving training. Blockchain-based distributed intelligent

IoT applications.