Enabling Auction-based Cross-Blockchain Protocol for Online Anonymous Payment

Abstract

Nowadays, online medical services have been greatly developing. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are very suitable for online medical electronic payment scenarios that require identity privacy protection because of their good anonymity and financial payment attributes. However, cryptocurrencies varies widely, the need of cryptocurrencies exchange is urgent for patients to pay different doctors and platforms with diverse cryptocurrencies. Exchanging cryptocurrencies through centralized exchanges has problems such as high fees and cumbersome operations. The decentralized exchanges mainly focus on cross-blockchain connectivity but high intermediate fees charged by connectors are ignored. In order to minimize the exchange fees, we propose a cross-blockchain connector selection scheme utilizing the reverse Vickrey auction along with Interledger. Our scheme abstracts the connector nodes selection into a service provider bidding process, throught which we can find the very node with the lowest bid, namely, the least exchange fees, as the ideal cross-blockchain service provider. Our scheme implements cross-blockchain payment of different cryptocurrencies conveniently, quickly and cheaply, which can provide patients with better identity protection of personal privacy information. Security analysis and performance evaluations show that our scheme can effectively promote the applications of cryptocurrencies in the field of medical care.