Related papers: Probing Channel Balances in the Lightning Network
Since the creation of Bitcoin, transaction tracking is one of the prominent means for following the movement of Bitcoins involved in illegal activities. Although every Bitcoin transaction is recorded in the blockchain database, which is…
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…
Despite growing adoption of cryptocurrencies, making fast payments at scale remains a challenge. Payment channel networks (PCNs) such as the Lightning Network have emerged as a viable scaling solution. However, completing payments on PCNs…
Off-chain transaction channels represent one of the leading techniques to scale the transaction throughput in cryptocurrencies. However, the economic effect of transaction channels on the system has not been explored much until now. We…
In PCNs, nodes that forward payments between a source and a receiver are paid a small fee if the payment is successful. The fee is a compensation for temporarily committing funds to the payment. However, payments may fail due to…
Following in the footsteps of pioneer Bitcoin, many altcoins as well as coloured coins have been being developed and merchandised adopting blockchain as the core enabling technology. However, since interoperability and scalability, due to…
Payment Channel Networks (PCNs) have been proposed as an alternative solution to the scalability, throughput, and cost overhead problems associated with blockchain transactions. By facilitating offchain execution of transactions, PCNs…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) are a promising solution to the scalability problem of cryptocurrencies. Any two users connected by a payment channel in the network can theoretically send an unbounded number of instant, costless…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) have emerged as a scalability solution for blockchains built on the concept of a payment channel: a setting that allows two nodes to safely transact between themselves in high frequencies based on…
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…
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,…
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies received a lot of attention recently for their applications in many domains. IoT domain is one of such applications, which can utilize cryptocur-rencies for micro payments without compromising their payment…
The Lightning Network is a so-called second-layer technology built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain to provide "off-chain" fast payment channels between users, which means that not all transactions are settled and stored on the main…
Permissionless blockchains protocols such as Bitcoin are inherently limited in transaction throughput and latency. Current efforts to address this key issue focus on off-chain payment channels that can be combined in a Payment-Channel…
Privacy protection mechanisms are a fundamental aspect of security in cryptocurrency systems, particularly in decentralized networks such as Bitcoin. Although Bitcoin addresses are not directly associated with real-world identities, this…
Network-level privacy is the Achilles heel of financial privacy in cryptocurrencies. Financial privacy amounts to achieving and maintaining blockchain- and network-level privacy. Blockchain-level privacy recently received substantial…
The Bitcoin protocol prevents the occurrence of double-spending (DS), i.e. the utilization of the same currency unit more than once. At the same time a DS attack, where more conflicting transactions are generated, might be performed to…
This thesis proposes techniques aiming to make blockchain technologies and smart contract platforms practical by improving their scalability, latency, and privacy. This thesis starts by presenting the design and implementation of…
The wide deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) has given rise to strong demands for optimizing their inference performance. Today's techniques serving this purpose primarily focus on reducing latency and improving throughput through…
Over the last years, considerable attention has been given to the privacy of individuals in wireless environments. Although significantly improved over the previous generations of mobile networks, LTE still exposes vulnerabilities that…