Related papers: Optimizing Virtual Payment Channel Establishment i…
The Lightning Network is a peer-to-peer network designed to address Bitcoin's scalability challenges, facilitating rapid, cost-effective, and instantaneous transactions through bidirectional, blockchain-backed payment channels among network…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) enhance the scalability of blockchains by allowing parties to conduct transactions off-chain, i.e, without broadcasting every transaction to all blockchain participants. To conduct transactions, a sender and…
Payment channel hub (PCH), by leveraging a powerful hub to reliably provide off-chain payment services, offers an effective enhancement to payment channel networks (PCNs). However, existing approaches typically rely on a single hub to relay…
Payment channel networks like Bitcoin's Lightning network are an auspicious approach for realizing high transaction throughput and almost-instant confirmations in blockchain networks. However, the ability to successfully make payments in…
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…
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…
The Lightning Network (LN) is a prominent payment channel network aimed at addressing Bitcoin's scalability issues. Due to the privacy of channel balances, senders cannot reliably choose sufficiently liquid payment paths and resort to a…
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…
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…
Lightning Network (LN) is designed to amend the scalability and privacy issues of Bitcoin. It's a payment channel network where Bitcoin transactions are issued off chain, onion routed through a private payment path with the aim to settle…
Off-chain transaction networks can mitigate the scalability issues of today's trustless electronic cash systems such as Bitcoin. However, these peer-to-peer networks also introduce a new attack surface which is not well-understood today.…
Payment channel networks (PCN) are used in cryptocurrencies to enhance the performance and scalability of off-chain transactions. Except for opening and closing of a payment channel, no other transaction requests accepted by a PCN are…
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…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) offer a promising solution to address the limited transaction throughput of deployed blockchains. However, several attacks have recently been proposed that stress the vulnerability of PCNs to timelock and…
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…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) are a promising solution to address blockchain scalability and throughput challenges, However, the security of PCNs and their vulnerability to attacks are not sufficiently studied. In this paper, we introduce…
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…
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…
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,…
Payment channel networks provide a fast and scalable solution to relay funds, acting as a second layer to slower and less scalable blockchain protocols. In this paper, we present an accessible, low-cost attack in which the attacker…