Incentivizing Throughput Enhancement in Blockchain-based Energy Trading System

Blockchain-based energy trading (BBET) systems depend on prosumers to allocate energy between trading activities and blockchain mining operations. However, inadequate incentive structures lead prosumers to under-contribute to mining, creating throughput bottlenecks and system performance degradation. This paper introduces the Fee and Two-Piece Compensation (FTPC) mechanism to optimize energy allocation and enhance system throughput. We formulate the interaction between the system designer and prosumers as a three-stage Stackelberg game where the system designer establishes the incentive framework in Stage I, while prosumers determine energy allocation in Stage II and set transaction fees in Stage III. Our analysis demonstrates that prosumers' failure to internalize mining's positive externality results in suboptimal throughput investment. Counterintuitively, we show that impatient prosumers may exploit others' mining contributions as free riders. The FTPC mechanism resolves these issues by jointly optimizing transaction fees and compensation structures to align individual incentives with social welfare. We prove that FTPC achieves socially optimal outcomes through fully decentralized decision-making. Numerical evaluation shows FTPC improves social welfare and prosumer payoffs by 88.1% and 87.8%, respectively. Ethereum testbed implementation validates equilibrium convergence through iterative best-response dynamics. © 2002-2012 IEEE.