Sluice: Global Invariant, Local Enforcement for Pooled Payment-Channel Liquidity
Sluice proposes nested Lightning channel reservations that recover much of the liquidity lost to static quotas.
The cs.CR paper Sluice studies Lightning Network routing nodes whose payments fail on one exhausted channel while other channels still hold balance. Pooling liquidity requires a global reserve that each counterparty can enforce without a shared off-chain counter. On three Lightning snapshots, splitting the reserve into advance per-channel quotas forfeits 16% to 67% of the pooling gain, and the loss grows with channel count. Sluice keeps an exclusive per-channel base and authorizes shared overflow with certificates from a capacity-weighted quorum, recovering 19% to 65% of that loss while losing at most 1.3 points of payment success to coordination.
- Static per-channel quotas forfeit 16% to 67% of pooling gains.
- Nested bases and quorum certificates recover 19% to 65% of that loss.
- Conflicting certificates share an honest signer, so no slashable stake is required.
- Recreating only overflowed bases costs 0.5 to 1.2 times Lightning on-chain bytes.
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- Lightning Network
From the original article
1 min read at arxiv.orgA routing node on the Lightning Network holds its liquidity in separate channels, so a payment can fail at a channel whose outbound balance is exhausted while the node's other channels still hold balance.
By Yueqi Wu · arxiv.org
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