Liquidity Network: Non-Custodial Financial Intermediaries

Details

Proof of Work Blockchains are meant to offer an alternative to custodian payment systems, enabling the users to remain custodians of their funds. The limited transaction throughput of PoW blockchains, however, results in for example unpredictable transaction fees which disqualifies e.g. micropayments.

We present Liquidity Network’s NOCUST, a novel non-custodial 2nd-layer financial intermediary solution secure against double-spending that guarantees users control of funds through leveraging a smart contract enabled decentralized blockchain ledger as a means of dispute resolution.

NOCUST is operational on the Ethereum mainnet since June’18. The operational costs of NOCUST are currently less than 100 USD per month, which allows to offer zero-fee transactions and enabling micropayments for millions of users. The creation of off- from on-chain funds costs a constant of <135'000 gas, the creation of on- from off-chain funds bears a base cost of 315'000 gas, while a dispute costs a base of 240'000 gas. User on-boarding does not require previous on-chain funds, a simple off-chain faucet can therefore directly engage users within the off-chain ecosystem. Users are moreover not required to remain online to receive off-chain funds, NOCUST therefore lowers the online presence requirement, and thus increases the security of the user's funds.


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Speaker Bio:

Arthur is Assistant Professor at Imperial College London where he is leading a research group with Security, Privacy and Scalability focus on blockchain technology. Arthur is also CEO and co-founder of Liquidity Network, the first bi-directional off-chain wallet for Ethereum, and co-founder of ChainSecurity that built the first one-click smart contract formal verification tool securify.ch.

Arthur obtained his Ph.D. from ETH Zurich on the topic of blockchain security in 2016, where he designed and published a variety of open source software, such as the first realistic blockchain network simulator (https://github.com/arthurgervais/Bitcoin-Simulator). He compared the security provisions of different block size and time intervals quantitatively, showing that, e.g., 37 Ethereum block confirmations are equal to 6 Bitcoin block confirmations from a security point of view. He published over 8 peer-reviewed academic contributions (https://scholar.google.com/citations?usµer=jLr_xi4AAAAJ&hl=en).