Boomerang: Redundancy Improves Latency and Throughput in Payment Networks.

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Presented at FinancialCryptographyandDataSecurity 2020 by

Joachim Neu

Vivek Bagaria

David Tse

In multi-path routing schemes for payment-channel networks,Alice transfers funds to Bob by splitting them into partial paymentsand routing them along multiple paths. Undisclosed channel balancesand mismatched transaction fees cause delays and failures on some payment paths. For atomic transfer schemes, these straggling paths stall thewhole transfer. We show that the latency of transfers reduces when redundant payment paths are added. This frees up liquidity in paymentchannels and hence increases the throughput of the network. We deviseBoomerang, a generic technique to be used on top of multi-path routingschemes to construct redundant payment paths free of counterparty risk.In our experiments, applying Boomerang to a baseline routing schemeleads to 40 % latency reduction and 2x throughput increase. We build onideas from publicly verifiable secret sharing, such that Alice learns a secret of Bob iff Bob overdraws funds from the redundant paths. Funds areforwarded using Boomerang contracts, which allow Alice to revert thetransfer iff she has learned Bob’s secret. We implement the Boomerangcontract in Bitcoin Script.