Toward Aggregated Payment Channel Networks

Payment channel networks (PCNs) have been designed and utilized to address the scalability challenge and throughput limitation of blockchains. It provides a high-throughput solution for blockchain-based payment systems. However, such “layer-2” blockchain solutions have their own problems: payment channels require a separate deposit for each channel of two users. Thus it significantly locks funds from users into particular channels without the flexibility of moving these funds across channels. In this paper, we proposed Aggregated Payment Channel Network (APCN), in which flexible funds are used as a per-user basis instead of a per-channel basis. To prevent users from misbehaving such as double-spending, APCN includes mechanisms that make use of hardware trusted execution environments (TEEs) to control funds, balances, and payments. The distributed routing protocol in APCN also addresses the congestion problem to further improve resource utilization. Our prototype implementation and simulation results show that APCN achieves significant improvements on transaction success ratio with low routing latency, compared to even the most advanced PCN routing.