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This paper presents a formal analysis of the Lightning Network as a monetary system structurally diverging from Bitcoin's base-layer settlement model. We demonstrate that under increasing transaction demand, BTC transaction fees rise…
In this work we use formal verification to prove that the Lightning Network (LN), the most prominent scaling technique for Bitcoin, always safeguards the funds of honest users. We provide a custom implementation of (a simplification of) LN,…
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…
Bitcoin has emerged as a revolutionary payment system with its decentralized ledger concept; however it has significant problems such as high transaction fees and low throughput. Lightning Network (LN), which was introduced much later,…
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…
Nodes in the Lightning Network synchronise routing information through a gossip protocol that makes use of a staggered broadcast mechanism. In this work, we show that the convergence delay in the network is larger than what would be…
We study a random process over graphs inspired by the way payments are executed in the Lightning Network, the main layer-two solution on top of Bitcoin. We first prove almost tight upper and lower bounds on the time it takes for a payment…
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…
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…
Cryptocurrencies gained lots of attention mainly because of the anonymous way of online payment, which they suggested. Meanwhile, Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies have experienced severe deanonymization attacks. To address these…
We revisit the fundamental question of Bitcoin's security against double spending attacks. While previous work has bounded the probability that a transaction is reversed, we show that no such guarantee can be effectively given if the…
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…
Over the past decade, the Bitcoin P2P network protocol has become a reference model for all modern cryptocurrencies. While nodes in this network are known, the connections among them are kept hidden, as it is commonly believed that this…
The Bitcoin Lightning Network (BLN), a so-called "second layer" payment protocol, was launched in 2018 to scale up the number of transactions between Bitcoin owners. In this paper, we analyse the structure of the BLN over a period of 18…
Bitcoin is undoubtedly a great alternative to today's existing digital payment systems. Even though Bitcoin's scalability has been debated for a long time, we see that it is no longer a concern thanks to its layer-2 solution Lightning…
Bitcoin blockchain faces the bitcoin scalability problem, for which bitcoin's blocks contain the transactions on the bitcoin network. The on-chain transaction processing capacity of the bitcoin network is limited by the average block…
Smart Contracts and transactions allow users to implement elaborate constructions on cryptocurrency blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Many of these constructions, including operational payment channels and atomic swaps, use a building…
Payment Channel Networks (PCNs) are a method for improving the scaling and latency of cryptocurrency transactions. For a payment to be made between two peers in a PCN, a feasible low-fee path in the network must be planned. Many PCN path…
The fundamental building blocks of the Bitcoin lightning network are bidirectional payment channels. We describe an extension of payment channels in the Proofgold network which allow the two parties to bet on whether a proposition will be…
Recent work has demonstrated significant anonymity vulnerabilities in Bitcoin's networking stack. In particular, the current mechanism for broadcasting Bitcoin transactions allows third-party observers to link transactions to the IP…