An Energy-Efficient and Privacy-Centric Consensus Protocol for Secure Blockchain Finance Using zk-SNARKs

Blockchain technology has revolutionized financial systems, however, conventional consensus protocols, PoW and PoS face energy, efficiency, privacy, and scalability issues. In the study proposed a ZKPCA, a novel framework integrating zk-SNARKs to validate transactions secure the sensitive data. In proposed algorithm, it eliminates the need for resource-intensive mining or stake-based voting, instead relying on mathematically optimized proofs to ensure privacy and reduce computational overhead. We tested the benchmark Ethereum datasets to validate the ZKP Consensus against PoW and PoS in a Docker-containerized environment. We achieve the 99.8% reduction in energy consumption (15 mWh/tx vs. PoW’s 5000 mWh/tx), a 75 Tps throughput, and near-perfect privacy (99.9% score). The proposed algorithm achieves sub-second latency (1.0 ms) while maintaining BFT and addresses the critical gaps in the existing systems. In the study, we establish an energy efficient, scalable, secure, and sustainable consensus mechanism for blockchain financial transactions.