In the previous post, we introduced the concept of a state channel outcome: a piece of data that instructs the chain as to how to move the funds held in a state channel. In order for the chain to act on the outcome, the outcome must first be finalized. Today…

Hello, and welcome back to our state channel series! The aim of this week’s post is to go beyond the explanation of typical state channel interactions that we re-introduced last week, and begin to build an intuition for more advanced concepts, such as how state channels can be opened and…

If you’ve been following the Ethereum ecosystem for a while, you’ve probably already heard of state channels. You probably have already heard about their potential to improve the scalability of the blockchain, as well as their ability to provide “instant finality” for transactions. This is all old news, and you…

Web applications that use ethereum can take advantage of state channels for an improved user experience. Those which connect fixed groups of users for intra-group interactions are the best candidates for scaling with state channels. In this post I’m going to explain how a state channel wallet can be used…

Hi everyone! It has been a while since our last developer update, but we have been busy across all fronts. This developer update is meant to give a glimpse at some of the projects we have been tackling recently and highlight the direction that we’re going in. The goal of…

What have we been up to? ⚙️ Building Since publishing our paper in June, we have been heads-down developing the Counterfactual framework. All of our contract code has been open-source and available on github since August 1, and last week at DevconIV we open-sourced a monorepo containing all of our code, and released a set of specifications…

Frequently making transactions to progress the Ethereum Virtual Machine is needlessly expensive and slow. Most applications using Ethereum today work by updating a storage variable of an on-chain contract for which users pay transaction fees and spend time waiting for block confirmations. Naturally, this is quite slow. In order to…

At L4 we have been working on state channels and other blockchain scalability research. Today we’re excited to share one of the foundational pieces of our work: Counterfactual: Generalized State Channels (pdf). State channels are the foundational technology for useable distributed applications. They can be used in any interaction with…

Liam Horne and Jeff Coleman A fundamental limitation of blockchain applications is that blockchains are expensive. Sending transactions requires fees, and using ethereum to run smart-contract code is comparatively costly to other kinds of computation. The idea behind state channels is that we can make blockchains more efficient by moving…