Shardvpp: A blockchain-based sharded power data trading framework for cross-regional virtual Power plants

Abstract

Cross-regional electricity trading among virtual power plants (VPPs) requires the trustworthy circulation of heterogeneous power data, including generation forecasts, flexible-load capacities, demand-response commitments, metering records, delivery evidence, and settlement documents. Conventional centralized trading platforms suffer from single-point trust, limited auditability, and insufficient scalability when massive distributed energy resources participate in high-frequency electricity markets. Blockchain provides a tamper-resistant and auditable infrastructure for power data registration, transaction confirmation, and automated settlement. However, ordinary blockchain consensus mechanisms become inefficient when all validators must verify every electricity transaction and every power-data certificate. To address this problem, this paper proposes ShardVPP, a blockchain-based sharded power data trading framework for cross-regional VPP electricity markets. Inspired by the loop-based sharded consensus mechanism in BIT-FL, ShardVPP divides validators into multiple shards and enables different shards to verify different trading tasks in parallel. Each shard validates data authenticity, metering consistency, regional eligibility, contract compliance, and settlement correctness. If the current shard cannot reach a reliable decision, the protocol introduces the next shard in a loop-based manner until the accumulated votes satisfy a security threshold. The proposed framework combines off-chain power-data storage, on-chain hash commitment, smart-contract-based trading execution, and loop-based sharded validation. Security and efficiency analyses show that ShardVPP can reduce validation overhead, improve transaction throughput, and maintain Byzantine robustness when the fraction of malicious validators remains below the required threshold. The framework provides a scalable and auditable technical route for trusted cross-regional VPP electricity trading and energy-data circulation. The extended evaluation explicitly models 240 physical validator nodes, 12 active shards, 10,000 transactions, and 3.09 GiB of raw data, proof bundles, and on-chain envelopes per run. ShardVPP is compared with PBFT-Full, IShard, StableShard, and DynaShard under identical network and workload parameters. At an offered load of 1200 transactions/s, ShardVPP reduces average confirmation latency by 42.1% and increases achieved throughput by 6.6% relative to StableShard in the configured protocol-level simulation. Epoch-based verifiable random reshuffling and a hypergeometric capture bound further quantify resistance to persistent single-shard collusion.