Blockchain State Channels: A State of the Art

Abstract

Blockchain technology has been quite popular during recent years and it finally seems to present a significant rise with respect to its use for real-world applications. This advancement has brought up a critical challenge that public blockchain systems face, which is scalability. Most of the currently deployed systems fail to cope with increasing usage. In order to provide the promised security guarantees, large delays and high usage fees are imposed for submitted transactions and thus widespread adoption of the technology is hindered. A number of different approaches have been proposed to increase the capacity of blockchain systems with respect to processing transactions. The present survey focuses on one of the most popular ones, that of state channels, and to the extent of our knowledge constitutes the first collective survey of research in this field. An extensive analysis of relevant publications is conducted and a general view on the domain is provided. We have identified the limitations discussed through all relevant research efforts along with the various features that differentiate proposed designs. A comparison between retrieved papers is carried out on the basis of those limitations and features. Finally, future research directions are analysed while the role of state channels in the general public blockchain ecosystem is also discussed.

A Systematic Literature Review of Blockchain-Enabled Supply Chain Traceability Implementations

“…In addition to the blockchain platforms, development aspects are also critical. For example, the development and deployment of efficient and secure smart contracts [106,107], data management procedures (e.g., the use of hybrid approaches that enable decentralised storage to minimise on-chain data storage), and novel approaches that use Layer 2 blockchain solutions [108] remain a challenge. Moreover, by minimising the number of transactions and data stored in the blockchain, we limit the impact of immutability when not desirable or illegal data is at stake [109], as the information stored on the blockchain and decentralised storage systems such as IPFS cannot be easily deleted [110,111].…”

Blockchain Scaling Using Rollups: A Comprehensive Survey

“…Figure 2 shows how actors interact in a state channel system. State channels ensure that an arbitrary number of state transitions can happen between users off-chain while only having two transactions finalized on-chain [30]. In particular, payment channels are channels that restrict state transitions to payment transactions, i.e.…”

Optimized User-Friendly Transaction Time Management in the Blockchain Distributed Energy Market

“…Furthermore, in blockchains, for all transaction blocks, there is a fixed minimum time required before each block is created and appended to the blockchain [12]. For example, the bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains append their new blocks about every 10 minutes and 15 seconds, respectively [13], [14].…”

“…That is, it must not be less than 4. The total number of validators is given by (12). Thus, the minimum number of validators to achieve the shortest transaction time is given by (13).…”

“…For private blockchain, given 7 validation-qualified nodes, the least number of validationauthorized nodes given by ( 6) is 4. Likewise, considering P-pBFT, given 4 validation-qualified nodes, validation time of 3 pBFT-compliant nodes are administered as given by ( 13) under the condition in (12). This is under the condition of one malicious node.…”