Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Gnocchi: Multiplexed Payment Channels for Cryptocurrencies

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Book cover Network and System Security (NSS 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 11928))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

As the underlying technology of mainstream cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, blockchain builds a decentralized payment system. However, the security and consistency of such system derive from the wide replication of transaction data and expensive distributed consensus mechanism, which makes current cryptocurrencies suffer great scalability gap from meeting commercial demand. To date, several solutions have been proposed to solve the scalability bottleneck of blockchain systems such as Bitcoin-NG, sharding mechanism and off-chain payment network. The off-chain payment network is one of the most promising approaches since it could significantly extend the throughput of the system and provide cheap instant micro-payment. In this work, we introduce Gnocchi, a multiplexed off-channel payment channel scheme that offers a novel method to construct an off-channel payment system to allow multi-party payment in one channel. We formally model our payment network and analyze network connectivity of our scheme to show that this newly proposed scheme significantly reduces the routing cost and transfer fee for cross-channel payment in contrast to existing off-chain payment scheme such as Lightning Network. This improves the efficiency of off-chain payment system further. We introduce transaction supervisor in a channel while maintaining the decentralization feature of the system by elaborately designing a fraud proof contract to restrain any adversary in the channel.

The research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61672347).

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    The realization of the channel closure phase requires multiple contract functions due to the pending.

References

  1. Raiden network. http://raiden.networkwork/

  2. Andresen, G.: BIP 101: increase maximum block size (2016). https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0101.mediawiki

  3. Croman, K., et al.: On scaling decentralized blockchains. In: Clark, J., Meiklejohn, S., Ryan, P.Y.A., Wallach, D., Brenner, M., Rohloff, K. (eds.) FC 2016. LNCS, vol. 9604, pp. 106–125. Springer, Heidelberg (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53357-4_8

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  4. Decker, C., Wattenhofer, R.: A fast and scalable payment network with bitcoin duplex micropayment channels. In: Pelc, A., Schwarzmann, A.A. (eds.) SSS 2015. LNCS, vol. 9212, pp. 3–18. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21741-3_1

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  5. Eyal, I., Gencer, A.E., Sirer, E.G., Van Renesse, R.: Bitcoin-NG: a scalable blockchain protocol. In: 13th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, NSDI 2016, Santa Clara, CA, USA, 16–18 March 2016, pp. 45–59 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Wood, G.: Ethereum: a secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger. Ethereum project yellow paper (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Gencer, A.E., van Renesse, R., Sirer, E.G.: Short paper: service-oriented sharding for blockchains. In: Kiayias, A. (ed.) FC 2017. LNCS, vol. 10322, pp. 393–401. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70972-7_22

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  8. Gervais, A., Karame, G.O., Wüst, K., Glykantzis, V., Ritzdorf, H., Capkun, S.: On the security and performance of proof of work blockchains. In: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Vienna, Austria, 24–28 October 2016, pp. 3–16 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Green, M., Miers, I.: Bolt: anonymous payment channels for decentralized currencies. In: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2017, Dallas, TX, USA, 30 October–03 November 2017, pp. 473–489 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Khalil, R., Gervais, A.: Revive: rebalancing off-blockchain payment networks. In: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2017, Dallas, TX, USA, 30 October–03 November 2017, pp. 439–453 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Khalil, R., Gervais, A.: NOCUST - a non-custodial 2nd-layer financial intermediary. IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch. 2018, 642 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Kokoris-Kogias, E., Jovanovic, P., Gailly, N., Khoffi, I., Gasser, L., Ford, B.: Enhancing bitcoin security and performance with strong consistency via collective signing. In: 25th USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX Security 16, Austin, TX, USA, 10–12 August 2016, pp. 279–296 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Liu, Z., Tang, S., Chow, S.S.M., Liu, Z., Long, Y.: Fork-free hybrid consensus with flexible proof-of-activity. Future Gener. Comp. Syst. 96, 515–524 (2019)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Luu, L., Narayanan, V., Zheng, C., Baweja, K., Gilbert, S., Saxena, P.: A secure sharding protocol for open blockchains. In: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Vienna, Austria, 24–28 October 2016, pp. 17–30 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Malavolta, G., Moreno-Sanchez, P., Kate, A., Maffei, M., Ravi, S.: Concurrency and privacy with payment-channel networks. In: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2017, Dallas, TX, USA, 30 October–03 November 2017, pp. 455–471 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  16. McCorry, P., Möser, M., Shahandasti, S.F., Hao, F.: Towards bitcoin payment networks. In: Liu, J.K.K., Steinfeld, R. (eds.) ACISP 2016. LNCS, vol. 9722, pp. 57–76. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40253-6_4

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  17. Miller, A., Bentov, I., Kumaresan, R., McCorry, P.: Sprites: payment channels that go faster than lightning. CoRR, abs/1702.05812 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Nakamoto, S.: Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Pass, R., Shi, E.: Hybrid consensus: efficient consensus in the permissionless model. In: 31st International Symposium on Distributed Computing, DISC 2017, 16–20 October 2017, Vienna, Austria, pp. 39:1–39:16 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Poon, J., Buterin, V.: Plasma: scalable autonomous smart contracts (2017). https://www.plasma.io/plasma.pdf

  21. Poon, J., Dryja, T.: The bitcoin lightning network: scalable off-chain instant payments (2016). https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf

  22. Prihodko, P., Zhigulin, S., Sahno, M., Ostrovskiy, A., Osuntukun, O.: Flare: an approach to routing in lightning network (2016). https://bitfury.com/content/downloads/whitepaper_flare_an_approach_to_routing_in_lightning_network_7_7_2016.pdf

  23. Roos, S., Moreno-Sanchez, P., Kate, A., Goldberg, I.: Settling payments fast and private: efficient decentralized routing for path-based transactions. In: 25th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, NDSS 2018, San Diego, California, USA, 18–21 February 2018 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Tang, S., Chow, S.S.M., Liu, Z., Liu, J.K.: Fast-to-finalize Nakamoto-like consensus. In: Jang-Jaccard, J., Guo, F. (eds.) ACISP 2019. LNCS, vol. 11547, pp. 271–288. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21548-4_15

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  25. Vukolić, M.: The quest for scalable blockchain fabric: proof-of-work vs. BFT replication. In: Camenisch, J., Kesdoğan, D. (eds.) iNetSec 2015. LNCS, vol. 9591, pp. 112–125. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39028-4_9

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  26. Wan, C., et al.: Goshawk: a novel efficient, robust and flexible blockchain protocol. In: Guo, F., Huang, X., Yung, M. (eds.) Inscrypt 2018. LNCS, vol. 11449, pp. 49–69. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14234-6_3

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  27. Zamani, M., Movahedi, M., Raykova, M.: Rapidchain: scaling blockchain via full sharding. In: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2018, Toronto, ON, Canada, 15–19 October 2018, pp. 931–948 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Zhong, L., Wang, H., Xie, J., Qin, B., Liu, J.K., Wu, Q.: A flexible instant payment system based on blockchain. In: Jang-Jaccard, J., Guo, F. (eds.) ACISP 2019. LNCS, vol. 11547, pp. 289–306. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21548-4_16

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Chen Pan, Shuyang Tang, Zhonghui Ge, Zhiqiang Liu, Yu Long, Zhen Liu & Dawu Gu

Authors
  1. Chen Pan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Shuyang Tang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Zhonghui Ge
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Zhiqiang Liu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Yu Long
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Zhen Liu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  7. Dawu Gu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Shuyang Tang , Zhiqiang Liu , Yu Long , Zhen Liu or Dawu Gu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

    Joseph K. Liu

  2. Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, China

    Xinyi Huang

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Pan, C. et al. (2019). Gnocchi: Multiplexed Payment Channels for Cryptocurrencies. In: Liu, J., Huang, X. (eds) Network and System Security. NSS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11928. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36938-5_30

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36938-5_30

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-36937-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-36938-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation