Zero-Determinant Incentive Strategy for Transaction Trading in Blockchain System

Blockchain has been widely applied in many industries to provide secure and reliable services, in which the activities of the participating nodes are recorded as transactions. Although the original design assumes nodes disseminate the transactions voluntarily, they may be reluctant to provide transactions for others due to the lack of cooperative incentives. To fill the gap, we study the transaction collecting process in the blockchain system under the leader-based consensus protocol. Specifically, we design an incentive scheme to reward the followers if they provide unique transactions to the leader. Considering the selfish nature of different nodes, we model the transaction trading process between nodes as an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD), and a modified zero-determinant (ZD) strategy is proposed such that the follower could correlate the leader’s payoff with the leader’s cooperation probability. We theoretically prove the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. Simulation results show the leader’s payoff changes under the follower’s different control functions. The proposed scheme can regulate the behavior of blockchain nodes during the transaction trading process.