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arXiv · 2504.20536

Starfish: Rebalancing Multi-Party Off-Chain Payment Channels

Wenxuan Yu·Minghui Xu·Yuanzhe Zhang·Guangyong Shang·Guangpeng Qi·Dongliang Duan·Shan Wang·Kun Li·Yue Zhang
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Abstract

Blockchain technology has revolutionized the way transactions are executed, but scalability remains a major challenge. Payment Channel Network (PCN), as a Layer-2 scaling solution, has been proposed to address this issue. However, skewed payments can deplete the balance of one party within a channel, restricting the ability of PCNs to transact through a path and subsequently reducing the transaction success rate. To address this issue, the technology of rebalancing has been proposed. However, existing rebalancing strategies in PCNs are limited in their efficiency and applicability under realistic network topologies. Cycle-based approaches only enable rebalancing among nodes that form cycles, while non-cycle-based approaches incur high on-chain operation costs. In this study, we propose Starfish, a rebalancing approach designed for the locally star-like structures formed by high-degree routing hubs and their incident channels in real-world PCNs. By leveraging a hub-centric structure, Starfish reduces the on-chain overhead of rebalancing from quadratic to linear in the number of channels, achieving high rebalancing efficiency. We formally prove the security of Starfish and conduct comparative experiments against existing rebalancing techniques to demonstrate its effectiveness.

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Wenxuan Yu, Minghui Xu, Yuanzhe Zhang, Guangyong Shang, Guangpeng Qi, Dongliang Duan, Shan Wang, Kun Li, Yue Zhang. 2026-09-21. Starfish: Rebalancing Multi-Party Off-Chain Payment Channels. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.20536

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