Multi-Party Payment Channel Network Based on Smart Contract

Abstract

Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies are severely limited in transaction throughput and latency. A promising solution to this issue is a payment channel, which allows trust-free payments between two peers without exhausting the resources of the blockchain. A linked payment channel network (PCN) enables payments between two peers through a series of intermediate nodes that forward and charge for the payments. However, most of existing proposals only use the shortest path as the path of the transaction, which causes the frequently reused channels to be exhausted quickly. In addition, most of existing PCNs are almost only designed for payments between two parties, which leads to limited application scenarios. When multiple payments use the same intermediate channel, the two-party PCNs cannot achieve simultaneous payments. In this paper, we propose a multi-party payment channel (MPC) network, a payment channel proposal that supports multiple payments using the same intermediate channel simultaneously, thereby greatly expanding the application scenarios of payment channels. In addition, our channel selection and transaction conversion strategies can also increase the success rate of transactions. We implement MPC network in the simulated blockchain network and lightning network based on Truffle, and a large number of experiments verify the effectiveness of our solution.