(DSN)Sustainable Off-chain Payment Channel Network

Introduction

Payment channel network (PCN) is the most promising off-chain technologies to support massive micro payments for blockchain. The technology has been deployed in a number of blockchains including Bitcoin and Ethereum. For example, Lightning Network, a PCN built on top of Bitcoin, is currently able to provide a network capacity of about 200 million dollars, which is doubling every year. However, the existing PCN faces the challenge of sustainability, i.e., due to the imbalanced transfer in channels, the balance in one direction of channels gradually becomes exhausted, which makes the success ratio of payments in PCN suffers a major setback. Therefore, for the fast payment layer in our system, we propose a sustainable PCN based on a new idea of asynchronous agreement and design a new rebalancing protocol which can constantly balance the network without channel freezing.

Reference

CYCLE: Sustainable Off-Chain Payment Channel Network with Asynchronous Rebalancing, DSN 2022 (CCF-B).