Skip to main content

Feasibility of Stellar as a Blockchain-Based Micropayment System

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Smart Blockchain (SmartBlock 2019)

Abstract

The advent of Bitcoin was heralded as an innovation in the global monetary system, that could bring down transaction fees by circumventing the need for third parties and conduct transactions in real time. The divisibility of a blockchain cryptocurrency to even fractions of a cent, caused microtransactions to become feasible to formerly non-existent denominations. These microtransactions have spurred the development of novel ways of monetizing online resources and hold the potential to aid in alleviation of poverty. The paper conducts a feasibility study on Stellar as a blockchain-based micropayment system. It highlights the limitations in Stellar that impedes its progress and utilizes a characterization model for micropayment systems to evaluate the efficacy of the Stellar platform. The paper conducts a comparison with the micropayment solutions from Bitcoin, Ethereum and PayPal. The paper analyzes a subset of transactions from the Stellar blockchain to aid in drawing a conclusion on the undertaken study and elaborates on the mitigation tools to enable fraud prevention in online monetary transactions.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Stellar Network Overview. https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/get-started/. Last accessed 21 July 2019

  2. Manasse, M.S.: The Millicent protocols for electronic commerce. In: First USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  3. PayPal Inc. https://www.paypal.com/us/smarthelp/article/what-are-micropayments-faq664. Last accessed 5 July 2019

  4. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/30/facebook-earnings-q4-2018.html. Last accessed 20 July 2019

  5. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/2019-media-layoffs-job-cuts-at-buzzfeed-huffpost-vice-details-2019-2?r=US&IR=T. Last accessed 15 July 2019

  6. Poon, J., Dryja, T.: The Bitcoin Lightning Network: Scalable Off-Chain Instant Payments (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Brainbot: Raiden Specification Document, Release 0.1 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Libra. https://libra.org/en-US/white-paper/. Last accessed 21 July 2019

  9. Brave. https://brave.com/. Last accessed 2 July 2019

  10. Coil. https://coil.com/about/. Last accessed 6 July 2019

  11. Ramani, A.: Micropayments: A Viable Business Model. A project for CS 181, Stanford University (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Gai, K., Wu, Y., Zhu, L., Xu, L., Zhang, Y.: Permissioned blockchain and edge computing empowered privacy-preserving smart grid networks. In: IEEE Internet of Things Journal (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Gai, K., Wu, Y., Zhu, L., Qiu, M., Shen, M.: Privacy-preserving energy trading using consortium blockchain in smart grid. IEEE Trans. Ind. Inform. 15(6), 3548–3558 (2019)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Lundqvist, T., Blanche, A., Andersson, H.R.H.: Thing-to-thing electricity micropayments using blockchain technology. In: 2017 Global Internet of Things Summit (GIoTS), Switzerland (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Khan, N., Ouaich, R.: Feasibility analysis of blockchain for donation-based crowdfunding of ethical projects. In: Smart Technologies and Innovation for a Sustainable Future, Proceedings of the 1st AUE International Research Conference, Springer, UAE (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Khan, N., Ahmad, T., State, R.: Blockchain-based micropayment systems: economic impact. In: Proceedings of the 23rd International Database Applications & Engineering Symposium, ACM, Greece (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Accenture. https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-blockchain-id2020. Last accessed 1 July 2019

  18. Ali, T., Clarke, D., McCorry, P.: The nuts and bolts of micropayments: a survey. In: CoRR (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Pass, R., Shelat, A.: Micropayments for decentralized currencies. In: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 207–218. ACM, USA (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Parhonyi, R., Nieuwenhuis, B., Pras, A.: The fall and rise of micropayment systems. Handbuch of E-Money. E-Payment & M-Payment, pp. 343–362. Springer, Germany (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-7908-1652-3_25

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  21. Mazieres, D.: The Stellar Consensus Protocol: A Federated Model for Internet-level Consensus (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Stellar/ go. Transactions that fail during consensus are ignored by Horizon. https://github.com/stellar/go/issues/309

  23. Kniberg, H.: What Makes a Micropayment Solution Succeed. Institution for Applied Information Technology, KTH, Stockholm (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Abrazhevich, D.: Classification and characteristics of electronic payment systems. In: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Electronic Commerce and Web Technologies. Springer-Verlag, Berlin (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Weber, R.: Chablis - Market Analysis of Digital Payment Systems. Technical University of Munich, München (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Parhonyi, R., Nieuwenhuis, J.M.L., Pras, A.: Second generation micropayment systems: lessons learned. Challenges of Expanding Internet: E-Commerce, E-Business, and E-Government. IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, pp. 345–359. Springer, Boston (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-29773-1_23

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  27. Khan, N., State, R.: Lightning network: a comparative review of transaction fees and data analysis. In: Prieto, J., Das, A.K., Ferretti, S., Pinto, António, Corchado, J.M. (eds.) BLOCKCHAIN 2019. AISC, vol. 1010, pp. 11–18. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23813-1_2

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  28. Stellar Lightning. https://www.stellar.org/blog/lightning-on-stellar-roadmap/. Last accessed 3 July 2019

  29. GitHub Link for Stellar Data. https://github.com/nidakhanlu/micropayments-blockchain

  30. European Commission, Cybercrime. https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/organized-crime-and-human-trafficking/cybercrime_en

  31. McGuire, M.: Understanding the growth of the cybercrime economy. In: RSA conference, USA (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Compliance Protocol. https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/compliance-protocol.html. Last accessed 7 July 2019

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nida Khan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Khan, N., Ahmad, T., State, R. (2019). Feasibility of Stellar as a Blockchain-Based Micropayment System. In: Qiu, M. (eds) Smart Blockchain. SmartBlock 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11911. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34083-4_6

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34083-4_6

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-34082-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-34083-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics