Themis: Towards Decentralized Escrow of Cryptocurrencies without Trusted Third Parties

Abstract

We introduce an improvement fair exchange method called Themis, which does not require Trusted Third Parties. Themis system is implemented based on blockchain, and can provide escrow services for secure exchanging between cryptocurrencies and physical goods. We propose many application scenarios for Themis, such as peer-to-peer escrow payments, exchanges among digital currencies. We implement a test-net for Themis and the experimental results shows that Themis protocol is practical in real-world distributed environment.