Once a payment channel, however, is depleted (e.g., because transactions were mostly unidirectional) the channel would need to be closed and re-funded to allow for new transactions. Users are envisioned to entertain multiple payment channels with different entities, and as such, instead of refunding a channel (which incurs costly on-chain transactions), a user should be able to leverage his existing channels to rebalance a poorly funded channel.
To the best of our knowledge, we present the first solution that allows an arbitrary set of users in a payment channel network to securely rebalance their channels, according to the preferences of the channel owners. Except in the case of disputes (similar to conventional payment channels), our solution does not require on-chain transactions and therefore increases the scalability of existing blockchains. In our security analysis, we show that an honest participant cannot lose any of its funds while rebalancing. We finally provide a proof of concept implementation and evaluation for the Ethereum network.
Category / Keywords: applications / blockchain Original Publication (with minor differences): ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security 2017 Date: received 29 Aug 2017 Contact author: rkhalil at ethz ch Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation Version: 20170831:183812 (All versions of this report) Short URL: ia.cr/2017/823 Discussion forum: Show discussion | Start new discussion