Abstract
Payment channels allow a sender to do multiple transactions with a receiver without recording each single transaction on-chain. While most of the current constructions for payment channels focus on UTXO-based cryptocurrencies with reduced scripting capabilities (e.g., Bitcoin or Monero), little attention has been given to the possible benefits of adapting such constructions to cryptocurrencies based on the account model and offering a Turing complete language (e.g., Ethereum).
The focus of this work is to implement efficient payment channels tailored to the capabilities of account-based cryptocurrencies with Turing-complete language support in order to provide scalable payments that are interoperable across different cryptocurrencies and unlinkable for third-parties (e.g., payment intermediaries). More concretely, we continue the line of research on cryptocurrency universal payment channels (\(\textsf{UPC}\)) which facilitate interoperable payment channel transactions across different ledgers in a hub-and-spoke model, by offering greater scalability than point-to-point architectures. Our design proposes two different versions, \(\textsf{UPC}\) and \(\textsf{AUPC}\). For \(\textsf{UPC}\) we formally describe the protocol ideas sketched in previous work and evaluate our proof-of-concept implementation. Then, \(\textsf{AUPC}\) further extends the concept of universal payment channels by payment unlinkability against the intermediary server.
We also point the reader to the full version of our paper [28].
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Notes
- 1.
For ease of notation we have considered that the each instance of the \(\textsf{UPC}\) contract is between the Hub and a single party, however, it can easily be extended to consider all the parties within a single blockchain to use the same contract.
- 2.
MATIC is the native token used in the Polygon blockchain.
- 3.
Notably they employ a separate SecretRegistry contract [27] to ensure that worst case delays are independent of the length of the payment route.
- 4.
As noted in [4], this is to avoid the risk of not being able to unlock the transfers, as the gas cost for this operation grows linearly with the number of the pending locks and thus the number of pending transfers.
- 5.
The limit, currently set to 160, is a rounded value that ensures the gas cost of unlocking will be less than 40% of Ethereum’s traditional pi-million (3141592) block gas limit.
- 6.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been partially supported by Madrid regional government as part of the program S2018/TCS-4339 (BLOQUES-CM) co-funded by EIE Funds of the European Union; by grant IJC2020-043391-I/MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033; by PRODIGY Project (TED2021-132464B-I00) funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/ 501100011033/ and the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR.
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Minaei, M. et al. (2024). Unlinkability and Interoperability in Account-Based Universal Payment Channels. In: Essex, A., et al. Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2023 International Workshops. FC 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13953. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48806-1_24
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