Parsec: A State Channel for the Internet of Value

TL;DR

Parsec introduces a scalable, off-chain state channel network leveraging web-scale technologies like Apache Kafka to enable fast, low-cost, and private value transfers across the internet, overcoming blockchain consensus bottlenecks.

Contribution

It presents a novel web-scale state channel architecture on Ethereum using Apache Kafka, improving scalability and performance over existing solutions like Lightning Network.

Findings

Achieves higher throughput than Lightning Network on Ethereum-based coins.

Enables near-instant, low-fee, scalable payments with enhanced privacy.

Utilizes Event Sourcing pattern for better scalability and interoperability.

Abstract

We propose Parsec, a web-scale State channel for the Internet of Value to exterminate the consensus bottleneck in Blockchain by leveraging a network of state channels which enable to robustly transfer value off-chain. It acts as an infrastructure layer developed on top of Ethereum Blockchain, as a network protocol which allows coherent routing and interlocking channel transfers for trade-off between parties. A web-scale solution for state channels is implemented to enable a layer of value transfer to the internet. Existing network protocol on State Channels include Raiden for Ethereum and Lightning Network for Bitcoin. However, we intend to leverage existing web-scale technologies used by large Internet companies such as Uber, LinkedIn or Netflix. We use Apache Kafka to scale the global payment operation to trillions of operations per day enabling near-instant, low-fee, scalable, and privacy-sustainable payments. Our architecture follows Event Sourcing pattern which solves current issues of payment solutions such as scaling, transfer, interoperability, low-fees, micropayments and to name a few. To the best of knowledge, our proposed model achieve better performance than state-of-the-art lightning network on the Ethereum based (fork) cryptocoins.