Anonymous Multi-Hop Locks for Blockchain Scalability and Interoperability

Abstract

Tremendous growth in cryptocurrency usage is exposing the inherent scalability issues with permissionless blockchain technology. Payment-channel networks (PCNs) have emerged as the most widely deployed solution to mitigate the scalability issues, allowing the bulk of payments between two users to be carried out off-chain. Unfortunately, as reported in the literature and further demonstrated in this paper, current PCNs do not provide meaningful security and privacy guarantees