A hybrid blockchain-enabled payment system for efficient electronic vehicle charging payments on electrified roads

The global shift towards sustainable transportation necessitates efficient and secure payment systems for electric vehicle (EV) charging on electrified roads. Current blockchain-based payment infrastructures face high transaction costs, inefficiencies, and security vulnerabilities, impeding EV adoption. To address these challenges, we propose a blockchain-based Vehicle Payment System (VPS) tailored for electrified roads. VPS integrates a hybrid consensus mechanism combining Proof of Stake (PoS) and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) for secure, decentralized, and efficient transaction validation. Scalability is enhanced through sharding, which distributes transaction load, while Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) ensure transaction confidentiality, and multi-signature transactions provide additional security. State channels further optimize performance by enabling off-chain transactions, reducing congestion, and increasing throughput. Unlike prior research, which often neglects scalability, privacy, and real-time performance holistically, VPS achieves under 3000 ms latency for invoke transactions, under 450 ms for queries with 1000 users, and a throughput of approximately 1100 transactions per second (TPS) at a send rate of 1300. These advancements establish VPS as a scalable, efficient payment solution for EV charging, supporting the transition to green mobility and informing sustainable infrastructure policies.