Konduit.channel

Outline

• What is …
• Architecture
• HTLs

What is …

Konduit?

A Cardano to Bitcoin Lighting Pipe

Bitcoin Lightning?

… a payment protocol built on the bitcoin intended to enable fast transactions among participating nodes and has been proposed as a solution to the bitcoin scalability problem.

The problem?

• Scalability
• Finality

Lightning

Overview

• A network of two party channels
• L1: Each channel is “underwritten” by locked funds
• L2: exchange messages altering how and who can claim these funds

Hops

• 2 channels: Alice <-> Bob; Bob <-> Charlie
• Alice ~> Charlie ?
• Alice ~> Bob ~> Charlie.
• Problem: Naive hops require trust

HTLCs

• Hashed TimeLocked Contract (also, utxo and general mechanism).
• A contract parameterized by (timeout, lock, payer, payee ) with two spend:
• Two spend pathways:
  • Ok:
    • Before timeout,
    • Has secret (hash(secret) == lock)
    • Signed by payee
  • Ko:
    • After timeout,
    • Has payee

Routes

• C ~> A : Invoice including lock.
• A ~> B : HTLC with timeout T and lock
• B ~> C : HTLC with timeout T - d and lock
• C ~> B : Secret
• B ~> C : Commitment to pay (no htlc)
• B ~> A : Secret
• A ~> B : Commitment to pay (no htlc)