ABC: An Auction-Based Blockchain Consensus-Incentive Mechanism

The rapid development of blockchain technology and its various applications have attracted huge attention in the last five years. The consensus mechanism and incentive mechanism are the backbone of a blockchain network. The consensus mechanism plays a crucial role in sustaining the network security, integrity, and efficiency. The incentive mechanism motivates the distributed nodes to “mine” so as to participate the consensus mechanism. The existing mechanisms bear the fairness and justice issues. In this paper, from the perspective of mechanism design, we propose a consensus-incentive mechanism through applying continuous double auction theory, which is abbreviated as ABC mechanism. Our mechanism consists of four stages, including initiation stage, auction stage, completion stage, and confirmation stage. The auction model in use is the continuous double auction to ensure the transactions are stored in a real-time manner. Through extensive experimental evaluations, our mechanism is proven to improve the fairness and justice of the blockchain network.