Online Learning in Blockchain-based Energy Trading Systems

In this paper, we consider a blockchain-based energy trading (BBET) system with the proof-of-stake (PoS) protocol. The system designer aims to minimize system cost by considering the prosumers’ strategic token allocation between blockchain staking and energy purchase for their applications. This is challenging as the system designer does not know prosumers’ private information of impatience levels towards different applications. To this end, we propose an online learning mechanism (OLM), which includes incentive mechanisms to guide both prosumers’ private information reporting and staking decisions in two phases. In the exploration phase, we design a randomized staking reward to encourage prosumers’ truthful reporting of their private information for the learning of impatience level distributions. Based on the threshold structure of the prosumers’ equilibrium staking strategies, in the exploitation phase, we propose a learning-error-based reward to minimize the system cost considering the finite-sample bias. By characterizing the optimal exploration duration, we prove that OLM achieves an asymptotic zero-regret against the complete information benchmark, with the regret bounded by O(³√ln T/T) when operating for T time slots. We implement the corresponding smart contract in Ethereum to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach. Experiment results show that our mechanism reduces regret by an average of 74% compared to the state-of-art mechanism. © 2024 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).