monoCash: A Channel-Free Payment Network Via Trusted Monotonic Counters

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are gaining popularity thanks to their prominent advantages compared to legacy financial transaction systems. However, they require all participants to reach a consensus on the order of transactions, which fundamentally limits their performance in terms of confirmation latency and throughput, thus hindering their further deployment. Off-chain payment network is the state-of-the-art approach of solving this performance issue. Unfortunately, all existing payment networks are based on payment channels, which bring extra overhead, cost and vulnerabilities. In this paper, by leveraging trusted monotonic counters, we propose monoCash, the first off-chain payment network that is channel-free, thereby it is one-hop, routing-free, concurrency-friendly, rebalancing-free and wormhole-resilient. We implement and deploy monoCash on a wide area network of 3,000 nodes. The benchmark shows that it provides a throughput up to 30,000 transactions per second (higher than credit card systems, e.g., VISA).