Paper 2017/823

Revive: Rebalancing Off-Blockchain Payment Networks

Rami Khalil and Arthur Gervais

Abstract

Scaling the transaction throughput of decentralized blockchain ledgers such as Bitcoin and Ethereum has been an ongoing challenge. Two-party duplex payment channels have been designed and used as building blocks to construct linked payment networks, which allow atomic and trust-free payments between parties without exhausting the resources of the blockchain. 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.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Minor revision. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security 2017
Keywords
blockchain
Contact author(s)
rkhalil @ ethz ch
History
2017-08-31: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2017/823
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2017/823,
      author = {Rami Khalil and Arthur Gervais},
      title = {Revive: Rebalancing Off-Blockchain Payment Networks},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2017/823},
      year = {2017},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/823}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/823}
}
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