What does the MIT-developed ‘Spider’ Crypto routing scheme improve?
Addressing the scalability issue, It provides a more efficient type of payment channel network (PCN) for Cryptos
Cryptocurrencies have been criticized over the years for not being as scalable as the legacy financial systems when it comes to procession transactions. While a lot of new innovative solutions are being implemented to address this problem, we are still far from an efficient cryptosystem that can compete with traditional players like Visa.
Lightning network — a layer 2 scaling solution for the Bitcoin blockchain has been a big step forward in this direction. It has enabled the use of BTC for micropayments like in brick-and-mortar stores. Keeping in perspective that Lightning only takes seconds for the same transactions that can take anywhere between 5–10 minutes & even higher, were they to be confirmed on the bitcoin network itself, it is a huge improvement.
Developers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have now come up with an even more efficient system for cryptos dubbed as the payment channel network (PCN). The report from CSAIL suggests that inefficient routing schemes are the main culprit behind the slow transactions. The new routing scheme called the “Spider” is apparently able to process 4x transactions as compared to other PCNs.
The newly developed system works with minimum involvement from the blockchain, where the main network is only pinged to establish and close the accounts. The spider routing scheme takes its inspiration from the internet packet switching method which involves breaking up larger transactions into smaller packets for easier & more efficient processing.
“Shortest-path routing can cause imbalances between accounts that deplete key payment channels and paralyze the system, Routing money in a way that the funds of both users in each joint account are balanced allows us to reuse the same initial funds to support as many transactions as possible.” ~ Lead author Sivaraman
Traditional PCNs employ off-blockchain escrow accounts with a dedicated amount of money, thus forming a separate interconnected network of joint accounts. These accounts charge a tiny fee to process these off-chain transactions. While the technique speeds up things, depletion of users’ balances in these accounts & slow routing schemes creates bottlenecks in these otherwise fast solutions. And this is what Spider PCN has set out to rectify.
These PCNs rely on bidirectional joint accounts where one account can be connected to multiple accounts at the same time. So even if you are not connected directly to the other user, you can use the intermediary route which is connected to both the sender & receiver. However, the transactions can only be processed on channels that have sufficient funds.
This offers a huge advantage over the traditional processing schemes which look for the shortest path — congesting one of the joint accounts handling too many transactions. If the balance in the account falls to zero, all the transactions would need to wait before the account is replenished. Also, this method only relies on sending full payment. So if the account doesn’t have enough balance, the transaction would look for the next shortest path, thus reducing the efficiency drastically.
Another innovation introduced in this PCN is the creation of queues at congested accounts — if the joint account can’t handle incoming transactions due to lack of funds, it would queue them rather than rejecting them. As soon as the account is replenished (within a reasonable time frame), it would process the transactions-in-waiting.
In addition to queuing, Spider employs an algorithm that monitors data to identify queueing delays at congested accounts to help re-route the transactions to keep the system running at optimal efficiency. According to the Spider PCN simulations, 95% of all transactions were processed using only 25% of the capacity needed in traditional schemes.
Next up, researchers intend to implement a similar solution for tricky one-directional payments called the “DAGs”. They are also working on data privacy issues. The team will be presting their research paper at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation later this month.
Published at Tue, 04 Feb 2020 21:16:46 +0000
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