Super payment channel for decentralized cryptocurrencies

• Main Authors: XU, Shengmin, YUAN, Jiaming, LI, Yingjiu, LIU, Ximeng, ZHANG, Yinghui
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2020
• Subjects: Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/5250
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Payment channel with penalizing double-spending has been widely applied in cryptocurrencies for achieving fast payment. However, current payment channel solutions suffer at least one of the following problems: 1) large overheads and communication costs are incurred to thwart double-spending; 2) payees must be defined before building payment channels; 3) a single payment channel does not support multiple payees; 4) no formally theoretical proofs are provided for the security of payment channels (as an open problem mentioned in CCS'15). In this paper, we fill these gaps by introducing a new fast payment protocol named super payment channel. We provide detailed construction based on digital signatures and accountable assertions with formal security proofs. We also implement our proposed protocol in different circumstances and demonstrate that our proposed protocol incurs a small overhead compared to ordinary Bitcoin transactions.