{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/sprites-and-state-channels-payment-networks","title":"Sprites and State Channels: Payment Networks that Go Faster than Lightning","arxiv_id":"1702.05812","date":"2017-02-19","proceeding":null,"authors":["Andrew Miller","Iddo Bentov","Ranjit Kumaresan","Christopher Cordi","Patrick McCorry"],"abstract":"Bitcoin, Ethereum and other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, as deployed today, cannot scale for wide-spread use. A leading approach for cryptocurrency scaling is a smart contract mechanism called a payment channel which enables two mutually distrustful parties to transact efficiently (and only requires a single transaction in the blockchain to set-up). Payment channels can be linked together to form a payment network, such that payments between any two parties can (usually) be routed through the network along a path that connects them. Crucially, both parties can transact without trusting hops along the route. In this paper, we propose a novel variant of payment channels, called Sprites, that reduces the worst-case \"collateral cost\" that each hop along the route may incur. The benefits of Sprites are two-fold. 1) In Lightning Network, a payment across a path of $\\ell$ channels requires locking up collateral for $\\Theta(\\ell\\Delta)$ time, where $\\Delta$ is the time to commit an on-chain transaction. Sprites reduces this cost to $O(\\ell + \\Delta)$. 2) Unlike prior work, Sprites supports partial withdrawals and deposits, during which the channel can continue to operate without interruption. In evaluating Sprites we make several additional contributions. First, our simulation-based security model is the first formalism to model timing guarantees in payment channels. Our construction is also modular, making use of a generic abstraction from folklore, called the \"state channel,\" which we are the first to formalize. We also provide a simulation framework for payment network protocols, which we use to confirm that the Sprites construction mitigates against throughput-reducing attacks.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1702.05812v2","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.05812v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"sprites-and-state-channels-payment-networks","repo_url":"https://github.com/enumatech/sprites-python","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}