Payment channel networks are a promising solution to the scalability
challenge of blockchains and are designed for significantly increased
transaction throughput compared to the layer one blockchain.
Since payment channel networks are essentially decentralized peerto-
peer networks, routing transactions is a fundamental challenge.
Payment channel networks have some unique security and privacy
requirements that make pathfinding challenging, for instance, network
topology is not publicly known, and sender/receiver privacy
should be preserved, in addition to providing atomicity guarantees
for payments. In this paper, we present an efficient privacypreserving
routing protocol, SPRITE, for payment channel networks
that supports concurrent transactions. By finding paths offline
and processing transactions online, SPRITE can process transactions
in just two rounds, which is more efficient compared to
prior work. We evaluate SPRITE’s performance using Lightning
Network data and prove its security using the Universal Composability
framework. In contrast to the current cutting-edge methods
that achieve rapid transactions, our approach significantly reduces
the message complexity of the system by 3 orders of magnitude
while maintaining similar latencies.
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Prism: Deconstructing the Blockchain to Approach Physical Limits
The concept of a blockchain was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto to maintain a distributed ledger. In addition to its security, important performance measures of a blockchain protocol are its transaction throughput and confirmation latency. In a decentralized setting, these measures are limited by two underlying physical network attributes: communication capacity and speed-of-light propagation delay. In this work we introduce Prism, a new proof-of-work blockchain protocol, which can achieve 1) security against up to 50% adversarial hashing power; 2) optimal throughput up to the capacity C of the network; 3) confirmation latency for honest transactions proportional to the propagation delay D, with confirmation error probability exponentially small in the bandwidth-delay product CD; 4) eventual total ordering of all transactions. Our approach to the design of this protocol is based on deconstructing Nakamoto’s blockchain into its basic functionalities and systematically scaling up these functionalities to approach their physical limits.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10145955
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 585 to 602
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3319535.3363213
