Designing a Privacy-Preserving Rebalancing Algorithm for Payment Channel Networks

In the past 8 years, Bitcoin has dominated the cryptocurrency markets and drawn attention from academia, developers and legislators alike. Bitcoin has been praised for its impact on decentralizing trust and currencies but also criticized for its volatility and energy-inefficient consensus mechanism. To improve its limitations, in 2016, payment...

Adding Redundancy To Splitting Protocols for a Better Performance

Payment Channel Networks have been developed to deal with the scalability issue in blockchain technologies. Using them, two parties can make multiple payments between themselves relatively fast. However, usually the channels have too small capacities, unable to handle a big payment. Allowing to split a payment into smaller payments and...

LRFP : Extending local routing protocols in layer 2 networks with a secure fee model

Blockchains like Bitcoin are known to be victim of scalability issues. The lack in high throughput and low latency form a great bottleneck to its network. A promis- ing solution are layer 2 protocols, more precisely payment channel networks (PCN). Payment success rates are a common metric in these networks. These rates can be in- creased by...

Splitting Payments to Increase Blockchain Effectiveness

Blockchain technology is the underlying mechanism that many cryptocurrencies operate on. It relies on cryptographic techniques that enforce integrity on transaction records. The records (blocks) stored are limited in size and frequency. One well-known issue regarding blockchain technology is the lack of scalability. In order to mitigate this...

Comparing Lightning Routing Protocols to Routing Protocols with Splitting

The largest payment channel network, Bitcoin Lightning, shows a potential alternative to cur- rent financial systems, overcoming the scalability limitations of blockchain. Source onion routing is used to route payments, but novel routing protocols claim improved effectiveness by employ- ing strategies not compatible with the current state of...

Improving Blockchain Anonymity Using Hop Changes with Partial Route Computation

The Lightning Network aims to solve Bitcoin's scalability problem by providing a way to transact with minimal use of the blockchain. Instead, payments are routed over payment channel networks. This routing is done by LN clients, which use cost functions to compute the optimal transaction path. With the use of onion routing, LN tries to hide the...

How Lightning's Routing Diminishes its Anonymity

Lightning, the prevailing solution to Bitcoin's scalability issue, uses onion routing to hide senders and recipients of payments. Yet, the path between the sender and the recipient along which payments are routed is selected such that it is short, cost efficient, and fast. The low degree of randomness in the path selection entails that...

Post-quantum adaptor signatures and payment channel networks

Adaptor signatures, also known as scriptless scripts, have recently become an important tool in addressing the scalability and interoperability issues of blockchain applications such as cryptocurrencies. An adaptor signature extends a digital signature in a way that a complete signature reveals a secret based on a cryptographic condition. It...

Designing and Evaluating Rebalancing Algorithms for Payment Channel Networks

Payment Channel Networks(PCN) utilize payment channels with an established link capacity between two nodes to route transactions over multiple links to carry out transactions. Such transactions can support a blockchain due to the transactions happening off-chain, i.e., not requiring any information to be published to a ledger. PCNs can help aid...