Building Stable Off-chain Payment Networks

Abstract: Payment channel is a protocol which allows cryptocurrency users to route multiple transactions through network without committing them to the main blockchain network (mainnet). This ability makes them the most prominent solution to blockchains' scalability problem. Each modification of payment channels requires a transaction on the mainnet and therefore, big transaction fees. In this paper, we assume that a set of payment transactions are given (batch or online) and we study the problem of scheduling modificiations on payment channels to route all of the transactions with minimum modification cost. We investigate two cost models for aforementioned problem: the step cost function in which every channel modification has a constant cost and the linear cost function in which modification costs are proportional to the amount of change. For the step cost function model, we prove impossibility results for both batch and online case. Moreover, some heuristic methods for the batch case are presented and compared. For the linear cost we propose a polynomial time algorithm using linear programming for the batch case.