区块链闪电网络实证分析:拓扑、发展和收费策略

比特币闪电网络作为最广泛使用的支付通道网络之一,自其2016年提出就引起了广泛关注.支付通道网络是一种用以解决区块链可扩展性问题的Layer-2技术.在支付通道网络中,参与者只需在区块链上提交开通和关闭支付通道的Layer-1事务,就可以在链下完成多笔支付交易.这一工作机制既避免了等待每笔交易被验证的时间耗费,同时也节省了交易费用.然而,由于闪电网络投入使用的时间较短,以往的相关研究都是基于有限的、闪电网络仍处于快速发展时期的数据,缺乏必要的时效性.为了填补这一空白,全面了解闪电网络的拓扑结构及其发展趋势,基于更新至2020年7月、具有高时效性的数据,采用图分析的方法描述闪电网络静态和动态的特征.同时对网络中节点进行聚类分析,并从聚类结果中得到了一些结论.此外,通过比较链上和链下的交易费用,对闪电网络的收费机制作了更进一步的研究.

Empirical Analysis of Lightning Network: Topology, Evolution, and Fees

Being one of the most deployed payment channel networks (PCN), the lightning network (LN) has attracted much attention since it was proposed in 2016. The LN is a layer-2 technology addressing the scalability problem of bitcoin. In LN, participants only need to submit layer-1 transactions on the blockchain to open and close the payment channel, and they can issue multiple transactions off-chain. This working mechanism avoids the waste of time on waiting for every transaction to be verified and simultaneously saves transaction fees. However, as the time of LN put in practice is rather short, previous works were based on small volume and rapidly-changing data, which lacks necessary time-effectiveness. To fill in the gap and get a comprehensive understanding of the topology of LN and its evolving trend, this study characterizes both static and dynamic features of LN by leveraging graph analysis based on data of high time- effectiveness updated to July, 2020. A clustering analysis of the nodes is carried out, and some conclusions and insights derived of the clustering results are presented. Moreover, an additional study of the charging mechanism in LN is conducted by comparing the on-chain and off-chain transaction fees.