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Two-Party State Channels with Assertions

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 11599))

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Abstract

An empirical case study to evaluate state channels as a scaling solution for cryptocurrencies demonstrated that providing an application’s full state during the dispute process for a state channel is financially costly (i.e. $0.24 to $8.83 for a battleship game) which can hamper their real-world use. To overcome this issue, we present State Assertion Channels, the first state channel to guarantee an honest party is always refunded the cost if it becomes necessary to send an application’s full state during the dispute process. Furthermore it ensures an honest party will pay an approximate fixed cost to continue an application’s execution via the dispute process. We provide a proof of concept implementation in Ethereum which demonstrates it costs approximately $0.02 to submit evidence regardless of the smart contract’s application.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We highlight a subtle difference between the initial state (\(\bot \), balance1, balance2) and the terminal state (balance1, balance2).

  2. 2.

    Our PoC is an optimised for Solidity https://pastebin.com/UBVvZ0FU.

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Acknowledgements

Chris Buckland and Patrick McCorry are supported by an Ethereum Foundation scaling grant, Ethereum Community Fund grant and a Research Institute grant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kings College London, London, UK

    Chris Buckland & Patrick McCorry

Authors
  1. Chris Buckland
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  2. Patrick McCorry
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chris Buckland .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Stirling University, Stirling, UK

    Andrea Bracciali

  2. Concordia University, Montréal, QC, Canada

    Jeremy Clark

  3. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Federico Pintore

  4. University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

    Peter B. Rønne

  5. University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Massimiliano Sala

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Buckland, C., McCorry, P. (2020). Two-Party State Channels with Assertions. In: Bracciali, A., Clark, J., Pintore, F., Rønne, P., Sala, M. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11599. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43725-1_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43725-1_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-43724-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-43725-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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