vipnode-contract

Smart contract for the Vipnode Pool.

Status: Work in progress.

Overview

Version 1: Vipnode.sol (Deprecated)

Minimum Viable Product implementation. Unlimited usage per interval billing, entirely on-chain.

Version 2: VipnodePool.sol

The goals are:

1. Support arbitrary per-usage billing
2. Simplest implementation
3. Minimize on-chain transactions

The compromises is that the pool is trusted using the same model as mining pools: The pool operator can run away with the funds from the previous billing interval.

Version 3+ (Someday)

Reduce trust required in the pool. Ideally, the pool will only be required to coordinate the initial connection between the host and client.

• Use state channels for direct payments between clients and hosts. This sounds good in theory, but in practice doing N:M state channels (many clients paying to many hosts) is incredibly expensive. Recall that any client can connect to any number of hosts over a given billing interval. To use state channels efficiently, we would need collateralized relays to aggregate N:M payments into fewer on-chain transactions, but this increases the total capitalization requirement.
• Use zero-knowledge proofs to aggregate transactions without collateralized relays. This is an active area of research.

License

MIT