Related papers: Speedster: A TEE-assisted State Channel System
For the enactment of inter-organizational business processes, blockchain can guarantee the enforcement of process models and the integrity of execution traces. However, existing solutions come with downsides regarding throughput…
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…
We propose Parsec, a web-scale State channel for the Internet of Value to exterminate the consensus bottleneck in Blockchain by leveraging a network of state channels which enable to robustly transfer value off-chain. It acts as an…
The blockchain-based smart contract lacks privacy since the contract state and instruction code are exposed to the public. Combining smart-contract execution with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) provides an efficient solution, called…
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…
The growing scalability demand of public Blockchains led to the rise of Layer-2 solutions, such as Rollups. Rollups improve transaction throughput by processing operations off-chain and posting the results on-chain. A critical component in…
Permissionless blockchains offer many advantages but also have significant limitations including high latency. This prevents their use in important scenarios such as retail payments, where merchants should approve payments fast. Prior works…
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 incrementally updated ledger maintained by distributed nodes rather than centralized organizations. The current blockchain technology faces scalability issues, which include two aspects: low transaction throughput and high…
Micropayment channels are the most prominent solution to the limitation on transaction throughput in current blockchain systems. However, in practice channels are risky because participants have to be online constantly to avoid fraud, and…
To improve transaction rates, many cryptocurrencies have implemented so-called ''Layer-2'' transaction protocols, where payments are routed across networks of private payment channels. However, for a given transaction, not every network…
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…
Most permissionless blockchain networks run on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, which offer flexibility and decentralization at the expense of performance (e.g., network latency). Historically, this tradeoff has not been a bottleneck for most…
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…
Cryptocurrency networks such as Bitcoin have emerged as a distributed alternative to traditional centralized financial transaction networks. However, there are major challenges in scaling up the throughput of such networks. Lightning…
Permissioned blockchains promise secure decentralized data management in business-to-business use-cases. In contrast to Bitcoin and similar public blockchains which rely on Proof-of-Work for consensus and are deployed on thousands of…
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has an enormous potential but also downsides. One downside of many DLT systems, such as blockchain, is their limited transaction throughput that hinders their adoption in many use cases (e.g., real-time…
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 Lightning Network, known for its millisecond settlement speeds and low transaction fees, offers a compelling alternative to traditional payment processors, which often have higher fees and longer processing times. This is particularly…
Mission-critical applications often run "forever" and process large data volumes in real time while demanding low latency. To handle the large state of these applications, modern streaming engines rely on key-value stores and store state on…