Related papers: An Exposition of Pathfinding Strategies Within Lig…
Following in the footsteps of pioneer Bitcoin, many altcoins as well as coloured coins have been being developed and merchandised adopting blockchain as the core enabling technology. However, since interoperability and scalability, due to…
The ambition of the Lightning Network is to provide a second layer to the Bitcoin network to enable transactions confirmed instantly, securely and anonymously with a world scale capacity using a decentralized protocol. Some of the current…
Payment channels are the most prominent solution to the blockchain scalability problem. We introduce the problem of network design with fees for payment channels from the perspective of a Payment Service Provider (PSP). Given a set of…
Bitcoin's success as a cryptocurrency enabled it to penetrate into many daily life transactions. Its problems regarding the transaction fees and long validation times are addressed through an innovative concept called the Lightning Network…
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…
Cryptocurrency off-chain networks such as Lightning (e.g., Bitcoin) or Raiden (e.g., Ethereum) aim to increase the scalability of traditional on-chain transactions. To support nodes in learning about possible paths to route their…
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…
The Lightning Network (LN) has enjoyed rapid growth over recent years, and has become the most popular scaling solution for the Bitcoin blockchain. The security of the LN relies on the ability of the nodes to close a channel by settling…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) are among the most promising solutions to the scalability issues in permissionless blockchains, by allowing parties to pay each other off-chain through a path of payment channels (PCs). However, routing…
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…
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…
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…
Making a payment in a privacy-aware payment channel network is achieved by trying several payment paths until one succeeds. With a large network, such as the Lightning Network, a completion of a single payment can take up to several…
Q&A websites rely on user-generated responses, with incentives such as reputation scores or monetary rewards often offered. While some users may find it intrinsically rewarding to assist others, studies indicate that payment can improve the…
Resource-constrained devices are unable to maintain a full copy of the Bitcoin Blockchain in memory. This paper proposes a bidirectional payment channel framework for IoT devices. This framework utilizes Bitcoin Lightning-Network-like…
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…
Payment networks, also known as channels, are a most promising solution to the throughput problem of cryptocurrencies. In this paper we study the design of capital-efficient payment networks, offline as well as online variants. We want to…
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,…
As an append-only distributed database, blockchain is utilized in a vast variety of applications including the cryptocurrency and Internet-of-Things (IoT). The existing blockchain solutions show downsides in communication and storage…
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…