A Public, Permissionless Layer-3 Rollup for Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading in Energy Communities: Design and Field Evaluation

The shift to distributed, prosumer-driven electricity is motivating local peer-to-peer (P2P) energy markets, and blockchain is widely proposed to operate them without a single trusted operator. The academic literature, however, is dominated by permissioned chains that reintroduce a trusted consortium, while public-chain alternatives remain on Layer-1 or argue for Ethereum rollups only conceptually. We present and evaluate a P2P energy market deployed on a public, permissionless application-specific Layer-3 rollup (Arbitrum Orbit with AnyTrust data availability, settling through Arbitrum to Ethereum).

The market is an hourly uniform-price auction whose clearing is computed off chain and verified on chain in linear time; we prove this verified clearing is outcome-equivalent to on-chain sorting and confirm it against the deployed contract. The system ran unattended for about three months, ingesting real metering data from energy-community pilots in Denmark, Italy, and Spain and clearing roughly 2,900 markets on chain. The field evaluation shows that clearing gas is dominated by data availability rather than computation and scales linearly at about 31,000 gas of execution per participant, that the chain sustained reliable hourly operation, and that the three communities differ structurally in their supply-demand balance and local self-consumption.

A simulation calibrated to the pilots and validated against the contract shows the mechanism discovering local scarcity and remaining above 93% allocative efficiency under strategic bidding. The contribution moves the rollup-based energy market from a conceptual design to a measured, reproducible deployment whose value lies in predictable, dedicated, low-trust capacity rather than headline cost.