Related papers: A Centrality Analysis of the Lightning Network
While being decentralized, secure, and reliable, Bitcoin and many other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies suffer from scalability issues. One of the promising proposals to address this problem is off-chain payment channels. Since, not all…
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…
The Bitcoin Lightning Network is a layer 2 protocol designed to facilitate fast and inexpensive Bitcoin transactions. It operates by establishing channels between users, where Bitcoin is locked and transactions are conducted off-chain until…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
The Lightning Network, a payment channel network with a market cap of over 192M USD, is designed to resolve Bitcoin's scalability issues through fast off-chain transactions. There are multiple Lightning Network client implementations, all…
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…
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…
Payment channel networks are an approach to improve the scalability of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. Because payment channel networks are used for transfer of financial value, their security in the presence of adversarial participants…
Payment channel is a class of techniques designed to solve the scalability problem of blockchain. By establishing channels off the blockchain to form payment channel networks (PCNs), users can make instant payments without interacting with…
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…
Payment channels were introduced to solve various eminent cryptocurrency scalability issues. Multiple payment channels build a network on top of a blockchain, the so-called layer 2. In this work, we analyze payment networks through the lens…
Cryptocurrencies are distributed systems that allow exchanges of native (and non-) tokens among participants. The complete historical bookkeeping and its wide availability opens up an unprecedented possibility, i.e. that of understanding…
Payment channel networks (PCN) enable scalable blockchain transactions without fundamentally changing the underlying distributed ledger algorithm. However, routing a payment via multiple channels in a PCN requires locking collateral for…
Blockchain technology has revolutionized the way transactions are executed, but scalability remains a major challenge. Payment Channel Network (PCN), as a Layer-2 scaling solution, has been proposed to address this issue. However, skewed…
The Lightning Network (LN) is a second-layer protocol for Bitcoin designed to enable fast and cost-efficient off-chain transactions. Channels in the LN can be closed either by mutual agreement or unilaterally through a forced closure, which…
The Lightning Network is a scaling solution for Bitcoin that promises to enable rapid and private payment processing. In Lightning, multi-hop payments are secured by utilizing Hashed Time-Locked Contracts (HTLCs) and encrypted on the…
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…