Leveraging Blockchain Technology for Secure Energy Trading and LeastCost Evaluation of Decentralized Contributions to Electrification in SubSaharan Africa The International Energy Agency has projected that the total energy demand for electricity in subSaharan Africa (SSA) is expected to rise by an average of 4% per year up to 2040. It implies that 620 million people are living without electricity in SSA. Going with the 2030 vision of the United Nations that electricity should be accessible to all, it is important that new technology and methods are provided. In comparison to other nations worldwide, smart grid (SG) is an emerging technology in SSA. SG is an information technologyenhanced power grid, which provides a twoway communication network between energy producers and customers. Also, it includes renewable energy, smart meters, and smart devices that help to manage energy demands and reduce energy generation costs. However, SG is facing inherent difficulties, such as energy theft, lack of trust, security, and privacy issues. Therefore, this paper proposes a blockchainbased decentralized energy system (BDES) to accelerate rural and urban electrification by improving service delivery while minimizing the cost of generation and addressing historical antipathy and cybersecurity risk within SSA. Additionally, energy insufficiency and fixed pricing schemes may raise concerns in SG, such as the imbalance of order. The paper also introduces a blockchainbased energy trading system, which includes price negotiation and incentive mechanisms to address the imbalance of order. Moreover, existing models for energy planning do not consider the effect of fill rate (FR) and service level (SL). A blockchain levelized cost of energy (BLCOE) is proposed as the leastcost solution that measures the impact of energy reliability on generation cost using FR and SL. Simulation results are presented to show the performance of the proposed model and the leastcost option varies with relative energy generation cost of centralized, decentralized and BDES infrastructure. Case studies of Burkina Faso, Cote dxe2x80x99Ivoire, Gambia, Liberia, Mali, and Senegal illustrate situations that are more suitable for BDES. For other SSA countries, BDES can costeffectively service a large population and regions. Additionally, BLCOE reduces energy costs by approximately 95% for battery and 75% for the solar modules. The future BLCOE varies across SSA on an average of about 0.049 kWh as compared to 0.15 kWh of an existing system in the literature.

EVChain: A Blockchainbased Credit Sharing in Electric Vehicles Charging The Digital economy is based on confidence in its trustworthiness. Blockchain distributed consensus provides a reliable and trustful network for financial and nonfinancial transactions. Blockchainbased electric vehicles (EVs) charging applications benefit blockchain features to provide automated and verifiable services for EV charging market. Requirements for feasible charging operation and privacy concerns are challenging issues with blockchainbased EV charging approaches. To provide a feasible charging ability and preserve EV owneru0027s privacy, we introduce EVChain. The EVChain is a trustful and decentralized platform based on blockchain technology to share charging credits in the EV charging market. To share credits, the main blockchain in EVChain is connected to one or more subnetwork blockchains. We introduce an interconnection position to preserve EV ownersu0027 privacy with kanonymity protection. We simulate and evaluate the privacy protection it provides, based on an example EV charging scenario.