Related papers: Brick: Asynchronous Payment Channels
Sidechain technology has been envisioned as a promising solution to accelerate today's public blockchains in terms of scalability and interoperability. By relying on the mainchain for security, different sidechains can formulate their own…
The Bitcoin white paper introduced blockchain technology, enabling trustful transactions without intermediaries. Smart contracts emerged with Ethereum and blockchains expanded beyond cryptocurrency, applying to auctions, crowdfunding and…
Payment channel networks are an approach to improve the scalability of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. Because payment channel networks are used for transfer of financial value, their security in the presence of adversarial participants…
Bitcoin is the most successful cryptocurrency so far. This is mainly due to its novel consensus algorithm, which is based on proof-of-work combined with a cryptographically-protected data structure and a rewarding scheme that incentivizes…
The blockchain constitutes a technology-based, rather than social or regulation based, means to lower uncertainty about one another in order to exchange value. However, its use may very well also lead to increased complexity resulting from…
Blockchain technology enables the execution of collaborative business processes involving untrusted parties without requiring a central authority. Specifically, a process model comprising tasks performed by multiple parties can be…
The development of blockchain technologies has enabled the trustless execution of so-called smart contracts, i.e. programs that regulate the exchange of assets (e.g., cryptocurrency) between users. In a decentralized blockchain, the state…
Performance and scalability are major concerns for blockchains: permissionless systems are typically limited by slow proof of X consensus algorithms and sequential post-order transaction execution on every node of the network. By…
As Lightning network payments are neither broadcasted nor publicly stored. Thus LN has been seen not only as scalability but also as privacy solution for Bitcoin. The protocol guarantees that only the latest channel state can be confirmed…
In this paper, we consider the problem of cross-chain payment whereby customers of different escrows -- implemented by a bank or a blockchain smart contract -- successfully transfer digital assets without trusting each other. Prior to this…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) are among the most promising solutions to the scalability issues in permissionless blockchains, by allowing parties to pay each other off-chain through a path of payment channels (PCs). However, routing…
This paper extends the blockchain sustainability framework of Budish (2018) to consider proof of stake (in addition to proof of work) consensus mechanisms and permissioned (where the number of nodes are fixed) networks. It is demonstrated…
The advent of blockchain technology and its adoption across various sectors have raised critical discussions about the need for regulatory mechanisms to ensure consumer protection, maintain financial stability, and address privacy concerns…
With the rise of digital currency systems that rely on blockchain to ensure ledger security, the ability to perform cross-chain transactions is becoming a crucial interoperability requirement. Such transactions allow not only funds to be…
Sharding is used to address the performance and scalability issues of the blockchain protocols, which divides the overall transaction processing costs among multiple clusters of nodes. Shards require less storage capacity and communication…
Blockchain technologies are taking the world by storm. Public blockchains, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, enable secure peer-to-peer applications like crypto-currency or smart contracts. Their security and performance are well studied. This…
There appears to be an insatiable desire for spawning new bespoke blockchains to harness the functionality provided by blockchain technologies, resulting in a constant stream of blockchain start-up companies entering the market with their…
Blockchains facilitate decentralization, security, identity, and data management in cyber-physical systems. However, consensus protocols used in blockchains are prone to high message and computational complexity costs and are not suitable…
Emerging applications of blockchains, such as grocery supply chains, require frequent updates to the data structure. This is in contrast with typical analyses of the Bitcoin blockchain, in which updates occur infrequently. With more…
Blockchains are maintained by a network of participants that run algorithms designed to maintain collectively a distributed machine tolerant to Byzantine attacks. From the point of view of users, blockchains provide the illusion of…