Public Channel-Based Fair Exchange Protocols with Advertising

2025-03-13

AI Summary

This work addresses privacy leakage, off-chain dependencies, and lack of incentive alignment arising from the decoupling of advertising and fair exchange in decentralized NFT markets. We propose the first formally defined and implemented fair exchange protocol integrating an advertising phase. Our protocol leverages zk-SNARKs to enable verifiable yet privacy-preserving advertisement metadata—without revealing underlying digital asset content—and employs Ethereum smart contracts coupled with IPFS to realize a fully on-chain, end-to-end anonymous transaction workflow, eliminating all off-chain communication. Crucially, we embed the advertising mechanism directly into the fair exchange logic, enabling incentive-compatible privacy-preserving advertising. Experimental evaluation demonstrates substantial reduction in on-chain verification overhead. To our knowledge, this is the first deployable infrastructure unifying advertising and fair exchange for NFT markets.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Fair Division
• Machine Learning: Privacy

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Advertising auctions, pricing, markets, and exchanges
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web

Abstract

Before a fair exchange takes place, there is typically an advertisement phase with the goal of increasing the appeal of possessing a digital asset while keeping it sufficiently hidden. In this work, we give a definition that explicitly combines a fair-exchange protocol with a prior advertising phase. Then, we construct such a fair exchange protocol with aids using zk-SNARKs and relying on mainstream decentralized platforms (i.e., a blockchain with smart contracts like Ethereum and a decentralized storage system like IPFS). Experimental results confirm the practical relevance of our decentralized approach, paving the road towards building decentralized marketplaces where users can, even anonymously, and without direct off-chain communications, effectively advertise and exchange their digital assets as part of a system of enhanced NFTs.

Problem

• Combines fair-exchange protocols with advertising phases
• Uses zk-SNARKs and decentralized platforms for secure exchanges
• Enables anonymous advertising and exchange of digital assets

Innovation

• Combines fair-exchange protocol with advertising phase
• Uses zk-SNARKs for secure and private transactions
• Leverages blockchain and decentralized storage systems