Off-chain Anonymous Payment Channel Scheme based on Mimblewimble

Zhenyu Guan, Lixin Zhang, Yingpeng Zhang, Dawei Li, Yu Sun, Jian Cui

Abstract: Mimblewimble, proposed by an anonymous author in 2016, combines several privacy protection technologies to enhance the Bitcoin blockchain. However, Mimblewimble does not support fast micropayments, and there are still problems such as high transaction fees and poor scalability. The payment channel allows all parties to perform transactions off-chain while maintaining the security of transactions on-chain to reduce the burden of the blockchain. It has been used in the Lightning Network to expand the blockchain. On the basis of Mimblewimble, our paper exploits a method of adding a random blinding factor to the amount of additively homomorphic commitments, and describes a scheme of using payment channels for fast off-chain transactions. The scheme can implement fast off-chain payments and improve scalability while protecting transaction privacy.