Related papers: Online Payment Network Design
Payment channel networks are an approach to improve the scalability of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. The Lightning Network is a payment channel network built for Bitcoin that is already used in practice. Because the Lightning Network…
Blockchain technology, while revolutionary in enabling decentralized transactions, faces scalability challenges as the ledger must be replicated across all nodes of the chain, limiting throughput and efficiency. Sharding, which divides the…
For preserving privacy, blockchains can be equipped with dedicated mechanisms to anonymize participants. However, these mechanism often take only the abstraction layer of blockchains into account whereas observations of the underlying…
As one of the most important and famous applications of blockchain technology, cryptocurrency has attracted extensive attention recently. Empowered by blockchain technology, all the transaction records of cryptocurrencies are irreversible…
Offchain networks provide a promising solution to overcome the scalability challenges of cryptocurrencies. However, design tradeoffs of offchain networks are still not well-understood today. In particular, offchain networks typically rely…
Blockchain protocols are inherently limited in transaction throughput and latency. Recent efforts to address performance and scale blockchains have focused on off-chain payment channels. While such channels can achieve low latency and high…
Blockchain is an emerging technology that has enabled many applications, from cryptocurrencies to digital asset management and supply chains. Due to this surge of popularity, analyzing the data stored on blockchains poses a new critical…
Many of the problems that arise in the context of blockchains and decentralized finance can be seen as variations on classical problems of distributed computing. The smart contract model proposed here is intended to capture both the…
The Bitcoin Lightning network is a mechanism to enable fast and inexpensive off-chain Bitcoin transactions using peer-to-peer (P2P) channels between nodes that can also be composed into a routing path. Although the resulting possible…
In this paper we discuss a design philosophy for interoperable blockchain systems, using the design philosophy of the Internet architecture as the basis to identify key design principles. Several interoperability challenges are discussed in…
In this paper, we propose a technique for rebalancing link weights in decentralized credit networks. Credit networks are peer-to-peer trust-based networks that enable fast and inexpensive cross-currency transactions compared to traditional…
We introduce a family of PCNs (Payment Channel Networks) characterized by a semi-hierarchical topology and a custom set of channel rebalancing strategies. This family exhibits two interesting benefits, if used as a platform for large-scale,…
In the past decade, blockchain has shown a promising vision greatly to build the trust without any powerful third party in a secure, decentralized and salable manner. However, due to the wide application and future development from…
Blockchains were originally designed as closed execution environments and lack the ability to communicate directly with external systems. To overcome this limitation, many blockchains employ relayers, external applications capable of…
Blockchain networks are facing increasingly heterogeneous computational demands, and in response, protocol designers have started building specialized infrastructure to supply that demand. This paper introduces Resonance: a new kind of…
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…
We present an example where a distributed coordinated protocol supported by a blockchain-enabled monetary mechanism leads to achieving optimal information theoretic degrees of freedom gains. The considered setting is that of a linear…
Mechanism design is now a standard tool in computer science for aligning the incentives of self-interested agents with the objectives of a system designer. There is, however, a fundamental disconnect between the traditional application…
Blockchain, like any other complex technology, needs a strong testing methodology to support its evolution in both research and development contexts. Setting up meaningful tests for permissionless blockchain technology is a notoriously…
Blockchain technology is an interlinked systematic chain of blocks that contains transaction history and other user data. It works under the principle of decentralized distributed digital ledger. This technology enables cryptographically…