Paper 2025/180

On the Atomicity and Efficiency of Blockchain Payment Channels

Di Wu, Zhejiang University
Shoupeng Ren, Zhejiang University
Yuman Bai, Zhejiang University
Lipeng He, University of Waterloo
Jian Liu, Zhejiang University
Wu Wen, Zhejiang University
Kui Ren, Zhejiang University
Chun Chen, Zhejiang University
Abstract

Payment channels have emerged as a promising solution to address the performance limitations of cryptocurrencies payments, enabling efficient off-chain transactions while maintaining security guarantees. However, existing payment channel protocols, including the widely-deployed Lightning Network and the state-of-the-art Sleepy Channels, suffer from a fundamental vulnerability: non-atomic state transitions create race conditions that can lead to unexpected financial losses. We first formalize current protocols into a common paradigm and prove that this vulnerability is fundamental—any protocol following this paradigm cannot guarantee balance security due to the inherent race conditions in their design. To address this limitation, we propose a novel atomic paradigm for payment channels that ensures atomic state transitions, effectively eliminating race conditions while maintaining all desired functionalities. Based on this paradigm, we introduce Ultraviolet, a secure and efficient payment channel protocol that achieves both atomicity and high performance, while avoiding the introduction of unimplemented Bitcoin features. Ultraviolet reduces the number of required messages per transaction by half compared to existing solutions, while maintaining comparable throughput. We formally prove the security of Ultraviolet under the universal composability framework and demonstrate its practical efficiency through extensive evaluations across multiple regions. This results in a 37% and 52% reduction in latency compared to the Lightning Network and Sleepy Channels, respectively. Regarding throughput, Ultraviolet achieves performance comparable to the Lightning Network and delivers 2× the TPS of Sleepy Channels.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
BlockchainPayment ChannelsCryptocurrenciesBitcoin
Contact author(s)
wu di @ zju edu cn
spren @ zju edu cn
baiyuman @ zju edu cn
lipeng he @ uwaterloo ca
liujian2411 @ zju edu cn
wuwen @ intl zju edu cn
kuiren @ zju edu cn
chenc @ zju edu cn
History
2025-02-10: approved
2025-02-07: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2025/180
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/180,
      author = {Di Wu and Shoupeng Ren and Yuman Bai and Lipeng He and Jian Liu and Wu Wen and Kui Ren and Chun Chen},
      title = {On the Atomicity and Efficiency of Blockchain Payment Channels},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/180},
      year = {2025},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/180}
}
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