Payment Channels

Payment channels are designed to enable high speed and throughput for transactions while requiring no counter-party risk.

This initial implementation is for unidirectional channels. Channels can be opened by a sender and closed immediately by the receiver, or by the sender subject to a dispute period. There are no top-ups or partial withdrawals (yet).

Usage

The following commands require communication with a full node. By default they expect one to be running locally (accessible on localhost), but a remote can be provided with the --node flag.

Create a channel

kvcli paychan create --from <your account name> --to <receivers address> --amount 100KVA --chain-id <your chain ID>

Send an off-chain payment

Send a payment for 10 KVA.

kvcli paychan pay --from <your account name> --sen-amt 90KVA --rec-amt 10KVA --chan-id <ID of channel> --filename payment.json --chain-id <your chain ID>

Send the file payment.json to your receiver. Then they run the following to verify.

kvcli paychan verify --filename payment.json

Close a channel

The receiver can close immediately at any time.

kvcli paychan submit --from <receiver's account name> --payment payment.json --chain-id <your chain ID>

The sender can submit a close request, causing the channel will close automatically after a dispute period. During this period a receiver can still close immediately, overruling the sender's request.

kvcli paychan submit --from <receiver's account name> --payment payment.json --chain-id <your chain ID>

Note: The dispute period on the testnet is 30 seconds for ease of testing.

Get info on a channel

kvcli get --chan-id <ID of channel>

This will print out a channel, if it exists, and any submitted close requests.

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