Related papers: Optimizing Off-Chain Payment Networks in Cryptocur…
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…
The last decade has experienced a vast interest in Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies with a specific focus on the applications of this technology. However, slow confirmation times of transactions and unforeseeable high fees hamper their…
The payment channel, which allows two parties to perform micropayments without involving the blockchain, has become a promising proposal to improve the scalability of decentralized ledgers such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Payment channels have…
Blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum execute payment transactions securely, but their performance is limited by the need for global consensus. Payment networks overcome this limitation through off-chain transactions. Instead of writing…
Scaling blockchain efficiency is crucial to its widespread usage in which the payment channel is one of the most prominent approaches. With payment channels and the network they construct, two users can move some transactions off-chain in a…
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…
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have made payment transactions possible without a trusted third party, but they have a scalability issue due to their consensus mechanisms. Payment networks have emerged to overcome this…
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…
A payment channel network is a blockchain-based overlay mechanism that allows parties to transact more efficiently than directly using the blockchain. These networks are composed of payment channels that carry transactions between pairs of…
In modern network design, "efficiency" is often conflated with raw performance metrics like latency or aggregate throughput. This paper proposes a resource-centric definition of efficiency, isolating the hardware cost required to maintain a…
While many researchers adopt a sharding approach to design scaling blockchains, few works have studied the transaction placement problem incurred by sharding protocols. The widely-used hashing placement algorithm renders an overwhelming…
Decentralized marketplace applications demand fast, cheap and easy-to-use cryptocurrency payment mechanisms to facilitate high transaction volumes. The standard solution for off-chain payments, state channels, are optimized for frequent…
Off-chain protocols (channels) are a promising solution to the scalability and privacy challenges of blockchain payments. Current proposals, however, require synchrony assumptions to preserve the safety of a channel, leaking to an adversary…
The Bitcoin Lightning Network (LN) is designed to improve the scalability of blockchain systems by using off-chain payment paths to settle transactions in a faster, cheaper, and more private manner. This work aims to empirically study LN's…
With emergence of blockchain technologies and the associated cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, understanding network dynamics behind Blockchain graphs has become a rapidly evolving research direction. Unlike other financial networks, such…
Offchain networks emerge as a promising solution to address the scalability challenge of blockchain. Participants directly make payments through a network of payment channels without the overhead of committing onchain transactions. Routing…
Today, payment paths in Bitcoin's Lightning Network are found by searching for shortest paths on the fee graph. We enhance this approach in two dimensions. Firstly, we take into account the probability of a payment actually being possible…
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…
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…
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…