Improving Transaction Success Rate via Smart Gateway Selection in Cryptocurrency Payment Channel Networks

Abstract

The last decade has experienced a vast interest in Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. However, slow confirmation times of transactions hamper their wide adoption for micropayments. The idea of establishing payment channel networks is one of the many proposed solutions to address this scalability. Due to the way these channels are created, both sides have a certain one-way capacity for making transactions. In this paper, we aim to increase the overall success rate of payments by effectively exploiting the fact that end-users are usually connected to the network at multiple points. The evaluation of the proposed method shows that compared to greedy and maxflow-based approaches, we can achieve much higher success rates.