Lilac: Parallelizing Atomic Cross-Chain Swaps

Abstract

Hashed Timelock Contract (HTLC) is a widely-used protocol for cross-chain asset swaps. However, it relies on serial asset-locking to guarantee atomicity, which causes high latency and poor fairness. Aiming at the drawbacks of HTLC, we propose Lilac, a cross-chain asset swap protocol that supports parallel asset-locking. Lilac replaces the unique asset-unlocking credential in HTLC with multiple sub-credentials generated by all participating users, and the sequence of sub-credentials is used as the complete asset-unlocking credential. Users obtain the complete credential only when all assets have been locked, and the credential construction process is independent of the order in which assets are locked, so atomicity can be guaranteed when users lock their assets in parallel. Experiments show when a swap involves 2 to 4 blockchains, Lilac reduces the swap latency by 36.75% to 62.20%. Moreover, Lilac reduces the waiting time gap between different users so the fairness of a swap is improved.