Value Trees: Multi-Hop and Asynchronous Economic Transactions in Distributed Systems

Abstract

Economic transactions in distributed systems are typically atomic operations that exchange resources between two parties. However, these types of transactions are not well-suited for environments where numerous entities contribute to a valuable outcome, such as the Internet of Things or content creation in Web 3.0. In this work, we propose a novel transaction concept called a “value tree” that can involve multiple parties arranged hierarchically. Value trees use smart contracts to enable asynchronous execution, allowing payments to be temporally de-coupled from the underlying resources exchange while providing basic assurances. We describe how we have implemented value trees using smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. We demonstrated the use of value trees in the context of named data networking, where all contributors to a successful data delivery are rewarded asynchronously.