A blockchain-based governance layer for verifiable bid integrity in electricity market clearing

Electricity markets depend on centralized clearing mechanisms that require participants to trust that submitted bids are preserved and accurately incorporated into the market-clearing process. Current blockchain-based energy market solutions either decentralize the auction mechanism or utilize the blockchain solely as a transaction log, lacking verifiable assurances that off-chain clearing employs the complete and unaltered set of submitted bids. This work introduces a hybrid blockchain-based governance architecture that enables verifiable bid integrity for centralized electricity market clearing while maintaining conventional off-chain clearing procedures. The architecture records cryptographic commitments of submitted orders on a permissioned Hyperledger Fabric blockchain, stores clear-text bids in restricted private collections, and anchors settlement outputs on-chain via an oracle interface. This design allows independent post-clearing verification that the orders used in clearing correspond precisely to those committed before auction closure, without disclosing confidential bid information. The system is evaluated using a real intraday electricity market dataset containing 46,643 orders from a full trading day in the Spanish market. Experimental results show that the architecture maintains one-to-one correspondence between submitted orders and on-chain commitments, enforces correct market lifecycle transitions, and detects inconsistencies between committed bids and the inputs used during clearing, providing tamper-evident guarantees of input integrity in adversarial scenarios. Performance benchmarking against a centralized database baseline shows that the blockchain implementation introduces additional latency and achieves 176.5 transactions per second under the evaluated configuration, reflecting a throughput-limited regime while remaining compatible with realistic intraday auction time windows. These findings demonstrate that blockchain technology can serve as a practical governance layer for electricity markets by shifting trust from unverifiable operator actions to cryptographically auditable input integrity, without requiring modifications to existing clearing algorithms. The approach does not verify the correctness of the clearing algorithm itself but ensures that its inputs are cryptographically auditable.