High Throughput Cryptocurrency Routing in Payment Channel Networks
Vibhaalakshmi Sivaraman, Shaileshh Bojja Venkatakrishnan, Kathy Ruan,, Parimarjan Negi, Lei Yang, Radhika Mittal, Mohammad Alizadeh, Giulia Fanti

TL;DR
Spider introduces a novel multi-path routing protocol for payment channel networks that improves throughput, balances channel utilization, and reduces the funds needed for successful transactions, addressing key scalability challenges.
Contribution
The paper presents Spider, a packetized, multi-path routing protocol for PCNs that enhances throughput and fairness compared to existing methods.
Findings
Requires less than 25% of funds to route 95% of transactions
Offloads 4x more transactions on imbalanced demands
Achieves high throughput with balanced channel utilization
Abstract
Despite growing adoption of cryptocurrencies, making fast payments at scale remains a challenge. Payment channel networks (PCNs) such as the Lightning Network have emerged as a viable scaling solution. However, completing payments on PCNs is challenging: payments must be routed on paths with sufficient funds. As payments flow over a single channel (link) in the same direction, the channel eventually becomes depleted and cannot support further payments in that direction; hence, naive routing schemes like shortest-path routing can deplete key payment channels and paralyze the system. Today's PCNs also route payments atomically, worsening the problem. In this paper, we present Spider, a routing solution that "packetizes" transactions and uses a multi-path transport protocol to achieve high-throughput routing in PCNs. Packetization allows Spider to complete even large transactions on…
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Taxonomy
TopicsCaching and Content Delivery · Peer-to-Peer Network Technologies · Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
