Privacy-Preserving Cross-Chain Payment Scheme for Blockchain-Enabled Energy Trading

Recently, blockchain-based transactive energy systems are introduced into energy trading scenarios which efficiently alleviates drawbacks in centralized energy trading systems such as low compatibility, poor flexibility, and single point of failure. Nevertheless, there still exists performance bottlenecks such as privacy leakage and low trading throughput, which limits the wide application of the blockchain-based energy system to the real world. To solve these concerns, this paper proposes a privacy-preserving cross-chain payment scheme for blockchain-based energy trading. We firstly adopt a stealthy communication algorithm to hide data privacy and transaction privacy during energy trading. Then, we apply the optimized-version hash-locking method to construct the cross-chain payment channel for two-way anchored transactions, which enhances the payment efficiency and hides the trading connection between the trading participants. Moreover, we use non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) to ensure privacy-preserving payment verification. The evaluation results demonstrate that our scheme can effectively protect privacy for cross-chain payment in energy trading systems.