Enhancing the Performance of Virtual State Channel Establishment with Smart Contract of Blockchain

Abstract

Since Bitcoin was first invented in 2008, blockchains have gradually gained public attention. However, as a global payment infrastructure, Bitcoin is extremely slow compared to traditional payment services such as PayPal and Visa. Even today, more than ten years after the emergence of Bitcoin, only a minority of people use it as a daily payment method. One of the reasons attributed to the low popularity of Bitcoin is the slowness of blockchains. Therefore, how to speed up blockchains has become a popular research topic. Among various solutions, the state channel, which processes numerous transactions outside of the main blockchain, is the most promising one. In this paper, we propose a broadcast strategy to speed up the construction process of virtual state channels that build upon state channels by using smart contracts. Moreover, we use the leader election method to ensure data consistency between two nodes in order to solve possible deadlock and race condition situations without breaking the security characteristic of the virtual state channel. According to our experiment result, the proposed strategy yields more than two times speedup on average and also achieves 50% speedup in terms of throughput when using asynchronous operation.