Blockchain-enabled decentralized privacy-preserving group purchasing for retail energy plans

Abstract

Retail energy markets are increasingly consumer-oriented, thanks to a growing number of energy plans offered by a plethora of energy suppliers, retailers and intermediaries. To maximize the benefits of competitive retail energy markets, group purchasing is an emerging paradigm that aggregates consumers' purchasing power by coordinating switch decisions to specific energy providers for discounted energy plans. Traditionally, group purchasing is mediated by a trusted third-party, which suffers from the lack of privacy and transparency. In this paper, we introduce a novel paradigm of decentralized privacy-preserving group purchasing, empowered by privacy-preserving blockchain and secure multi-party computation, to enable users to form a coalition for coordinated switch decisions in a decentralized manner, without a trusted third-party. The coordinated switch decisions are determined by a competitive online algorithm, based on users' private consumption data and current energy plan tariffs. Remarkably, no private user consumption data will be revealed to others in the online decision-making process, which is carried out in a transparently verifiable manner to eliminate frauds from dishonest users and supports fair mutual compensations by sharing the switching costs to incentivize group purchasing. We implemented our decentralized group purchasing solution as a smart contract on Solidity-supported blockchain platform (e.g., Ethereum), and provide extensive empirical evaluation.