The post SHINOBI: OFF-CHAIN PROTOCOLS WILL ALWAYS BE A BALANCING ACT appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Rene Pickhardt recently kicked off a thread discussing the differences between two party and multiparty (more than two participants) payment channels as it relates to his research work around payment reliability on the Lightning Network. He voices a growing skepticism of the viability of that direction for development. The high level idea of why channel factories improve the reliability of payments comes down to liquidity allocation. In a network of only two party channels, users have to make zero sum choices on where to allocate their liquidity. This has a systemic effect on the overall success rate of payments across the network, if people put their liquidity somewhere it isn’t needed to process payments instead of where it is, payments will fail as the liquidity in places people need is used up (until it is rebalanced). This dynamic is simply one of the design constraints of the Lightning Network known from the very beginning, and why research like Rene’s is incredibly important for making the protocol/network work in the long run. In a model of multiparty channels, users can allocate liquidity into large groups and simply “sub-allocate” it off-chain wherever it makes sense to in the moment. This means that even if a node operator has made a poor decision in which person to allocate liquidity to, as long as that person is in the same multiparty channel with people that would be a good peer, they can reallocate that poorly placed liquidity from one to the other off-chain without incurring on-chain costs. This works because the concept of a multiparty channel is essentially just everyone in the group stacking conventional two party channels on top of the multiparty one. By updating the multiparty channel at the root, the two party channels on top can be modified, opened, closed, etc.…

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Filed under: News - @ October 2, 2024 6:19 pm