Homomorphic Encryption-Based Transaction Confidentiality: A Comprehensive Analysis of Privacy-Preserving Peer-to-Peer Digital Payment Protocols

Abstract

Contemporary digital currency systems face fundamental challenges in achieving optimal balance between transaction privacy, computational efficiency, and cryptographic security. While zero-knowledge proof systems have dominated privacy-preserving cryptocurrency research, their practical implementations often involve prohibitive computational overhead that limits real-world deployment. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the Elliptic Homomorphic Token (EHT) protocol, which leverages elliptic curve-based partially homomorphic encryption to enable privacy-preserving peer-to-peer transactions without the computational complexity of zero-knowledge constructions. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates strong privacy guarantees under standard cryptographic assumptions, while experimental evaluation shows that EHT achieves 1000 transactions per second with 50-100ms latency. The protocol eliminates the need for complex zero-knowledge proofs by directly utilizing elliptic curve cryptographic primitives, resulting in performance improvements exceeding 100× over existing privacy-focused systems while maintaining equivalent security properties.