Related papers: Brick: Asynchronous Payment Channels
Smart contracts are stateful programs deployed on blockchains; they secure over a trillion dollars in transaction value per year. High-stakes smart contracts often rely on timely alerts about external events, but prior work has not analyzed…
Establishing efficient and robust covert channels is crucial for secure communication within insecure network environments. With its inherent benefits of decentralization and anonymization, blockchain has gained considerable attention in…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) enhance the scalability of blockchains by allowing parties to conduct transactions off-chain, i.e, without broadcasting every transaction to all blockchain participants. To conduct transactions, a sender and…
Micropayment channels are the most prominent solution to the limitation on transaction throughput in current blockchain systems. However, in practice channels are risky because participants have to be online constantly to avoid fraud, and…
An emerging blockchain protocol design pattern leverages the asymmetry between the computational effort in performing versus verifying tasks. For example, cryptographic validity proofs (e.g., SNARKS) require the prover to expend significant…
Cross-chain technology facilitates the interoperability among isolated blockchains on which users can freely communicate and transfer values. Existing cross-chain protocols suffer from the scalability problem when processing on-chain…
For permissionless blockchains, scalability is paramount. While current technologies still fail to address this problem fully, many research works propose sharding or other techniques that extensively adopt parallel processing of…
Cross-Blockchain communication has gained traction due to the increasing fragmentation of blockchain networks and scalability solutions such as side-chaining and sharding. With SmartSync, we propose a novel concept for cross-blockchain…
Bitcoin is the first successful decentralized global digital cash system. Its mining process requires intense computational resources, therefore its usefulness remains a disputable topic. We aim to solve three problems with Bitcoin and…
Payment channels allow transactions between participants of the blockchain to be executed securely off-chain, and thus provide a promising solution for the scalability problem of popular blockchains. We study the online network design…
In this paper, we construct a decentralized clearing mechanism which endogenously and automatically provides a claims resolution procedure. This mechanism can be used to clear a network of obligations through blockchain. In particular, we…
Bitcoin, Ethereum and other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, as deployed today, cannot scale for wide-spread use. A leading approach for cryptocurrency scaling is a smart contract mechanism called a payment channel which enables two…
Since the creation of Bitcoin in 2009 we have seen a great push towards public and private blockchains. In order to avoid fragmentation, a global network connecting all these blockchains is envisioned. Just like the Internet facilitates…
Off-chain transaction channels represent one of the leading techniques to scale the transaction throughput in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. They allow multiple agents to route payments through one another. So far, the topology and…
Bitcoin's enormous success has inspired the development of alternative blockchains, such as consortium chains. Several cross-chain protocols have been proposed as ways of connecting these universes of individual blockchains in a distributed…
For the enactment of inter-organizational business processes, blockchain can guarantee the enforcement of process models and the integrity of execution traces. However, existing solutions come with downsides regarding throughput…
Payment channel is a class of techniques designed to solve the scalability problem of blockchain. By establishing channels off the blockchain to form payment channel networks (PCNs), users can make instant payments without interacting with…
Blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum execute payment transactions securely, but their performance is limited by the need for global consensus. Payment networks overcome this limitation through off-chain transactions. Instead of writing…
The payment channel, which allows two parties to perform micropayments without involving the blockchain, has become a promising proposal to improve the scalability of decentralized ledgers such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Payment channels have…
Cryptocurrencies redefined how money can be stored and transferred among users. However, independent of the amount being sent, public blockchain-based cryptocurrencies suffer from high transaction waiting times and fees. These drawbacks…