Quantum-based privacy-preserving sealed-bid auction on the blockchain

Sealed-bid auction is one of the major protocols used in the electronic commerce industry. Recently, many schemes have been proposed to implement sealed-bid auction protocols based on quantum computing, while other schemes have adopted the blockchain. However, each of the previous proposals has focused on a few sealed-bid auction features while simply ignoring others. A robust sealed-bid auction protocol should comprise all important features and satisfy all requirements. We design a sealed-bid auction protocol using quantum-based blockchain, in which the transactions of the sealed-bid auction are stored using the blockchain and supported by quantum computation and communication to enhance security and protect privacy. Our proposed protocol takes advantage of both quantum computing and blockchain technology to ensure essential features and requirements. Security analysis, evaluation, and comparisons are presented to demonstrate the advantages of our protocol.