Garou: An Efficient and Secure Off-Blockchain Multi-Party Payment Hub

TL;DR

Garou is a secure, efficient off-chain multi-party payment hub that enables high-throughput, flexible coin transfers among multiple parties without blockchain involvement, ensuring security against adversaries.

Contribution

We introduce Garou, the first secure N-party payment hub that combines efficiency, flexibility, and security without relying on a trusted third-party.

Findings

Maximum transaction throughput is 20 times higher than existing payment hubs.

Participants can perform concurrent, direct coin transfers without blockchain or third-party involvement.

Garou guarantees balance security for honest parties against strong adversaries.

Abstract

To mitigate the scalability problem of decentralized cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, the payment channel, which allows two parties to perform secure coin transfers without involving the blockchain, has been proposed. The payment channel increases the transaction throughput of two parties to a level that is only limited by their network bandwidth. Recent proposals focus on extending the two-party payment channel to the N-party payment hub. Unfortunately, none of them can achieve efficiency, flexibility in the absence of a trusted third-party. In this paper, we propose Garou, a secure N-party payment hub that allows multiple parties to perform secure off-chain coin transfers. Except in the case of disputes, participants within the payment hub can make concurrent and direct coin transfers with each other without the involvement of the blockchain or any third-party intermediaries. This allows Garou to achieve both high-performance and flexibility. Garou also guarantees that an honest party always maintains its balance security against strong adversarial capabilities. To demonstrate the feasibility of the Garou protocol, we develop a proof of concept prototype for the Ethereum network. Our evaluation results show that the maximum transaction throughput of Garou is 20 times higher than that of state-of-art payment hubs.