Keynote: Advances and Challenges in Payment Channel Networks

Permissionless cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin enable se-cure payments in a decentralized, trustless environment. Trans-actions are verified through a consensus mechanism and all valid transactions are recorded in a public, distributed ledger, often called blockchain. This approach has inherent scalability issues and fails to meet the growing user demands: In Bitcoin, the transaction throughput is technically limited to tens of transactions per second and the transaction confirmation time is around an hour. In contrast, more centralized payment networks such as the Visa credit card network, can handle peaks of more than 40K transactions per second.