Related papers: Brick: Asynchronous Payment Channels
Sharding enhances blockchain scalability by dividing the network into shards, each managing specific unspent transaction outputs or accounts. As an introduced new transaction type, cross-shard transactions pose a critical challenge to the…
The rise of smart contract systems such as Ethereum has resulted in a proliferation of blockchain-based decentralized applications including applications that store and manage a wide range of data. Current smart contracts are designed to be…
Payment channels networks drastically increase the throughput and hence scalability of blockchains by performing transactions \emph{off-chain}. In an off-chain payment, parties deposit coins in a channel and then perform transactions…
Bitcoin is the cryptocurrency with the largest market capitalisation, but its widespread adoption is fundamentally limited by the scalability constraints of its consensus algorithm, which requires every transaction to be confirmed onchain.…
Payment channels effectively move the transaction load off-chain thereby successfully addressing the inherent scalability problem most cryptocurrencies face. A major drawback of payment channels is the need to ``top up'' funds on-chain when…
Money transfer is an abstraction that realizes the core of cryptocurrencies. It has been shown that, contrary to common belief, money transfer in the presence of Byzantine faults can be implemented in asynchronous networks and does not…
Payment networks, also known as channels, are a most promising solution to the throughput problem of cryptocurrencies. In this paper we study the design of capital-efficient payment networks, offline as well as online variants. We want to…
Blockchain and blockchain-inspired decentralized applications are on the rise thanks to their unique characteristics such as their decentralized nature, anonymity, and tamper-proof nature; however, blockchain transactions tend to experience…
Blockchains implement decentralized monetary systems and applications. Recent advancements enable what we call tethering a blockchain to a primary blockchain, securing the tethered chain by nodes that post primary-chain tokens as…
Smart contracts, the cornerstone of blockchain technology, enable secure, automated distributed execution. Given their role in handling large transaction volumes across clients, miners, and validators, exploring concurrency is critical.…
The Bitcoin Lightning Network, launched in 2018, serves as a layer 2 scaling solution for Bitcoin. The Lightning Network allows users to establish channels between each other and subsequently exchange off-chain payments. Together, these…
Options are fundamental to blockchain-based financial services, offering essential tools for risk management and price speculation, which enhance liquidity, flexibility, and market efficiency in decentralized finance (DeFi). Despite the…
Blockchain consensus is a state whereby each node in a network agrees on the current state of the blockchain. Existing protocols achieve consensus via a contest or voting procedure to select one node as a dictator to propose new blocks.…
Blockchains are among the most powerful technologies to realize decentralized information systems. In order to safely enjoy all guarantees provided by a blockchain, one should maintain a full node, therefore maintaining an updated local…
As an emerging service framework built by combining cryptography, P2P network, consensus mechanism and innovative contract technology, blockchain has been widely used in digital finance, data sharing, message traceability and electronic…
Blockchains have a two-sided reputation: they are praised for disrupting some of our institutions through innovative technology for good, yet notorious for being slow and expensive to use. In this work, we tackle this issue with…
Recently, cybersecurity becomes more and more important due to the rapid development of Internet. However, existing methods are in reality highly sensitive to attacks and are far more vulnerable than expected, as they are lack of trustable…
Blockchain enables novel, trustworthy Process-Aware Information Systems (PAISs) by enforcing the security, robustness, and traceability of operations. In particular, transparency ensures that all information exchanges are openly accessible,…
This paper describes a decentralized low-cost system designed to reinforce personal security in big events in case of emergency. The proposal consists of using smart contracts supported by blockchain in the management of events. An…
Blockchain bridges have become essential infrastructure for enabling interoperability across different blockchain networks, with more than $24B monthly bridge transaction volume. However, their growing adoption has been accompanied by a…