2026-07-22T01:43:18Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:24749 2026-01-21T09:56:28Z ddc:004 open_access

Ticket to Ride: Locally Steered Source Routing for the Lightning Network Alizadeh, Sajjad Khabbazian, Majid Lightning Network Source Routing Approximate Membership Filters Route discovery in the Lightning Network is challenging because senders observe only static channel capacities while real-time balances remain hidden. Existing locally steered schemes such as SpeedyMurmurs protect path privacy but depend on global landmark trees whose maintenance traffic and detours inflate latency and overhead. We present Ticket to Ride (T2R), a locally steered source-routing framework that encodes the set of channels a payment may traverse into a compact ticket - an approximate-membership filter keyed with per-hop Diffie–Hellman secrets. Each relay learns only whether its own outgoing edges are permitted, yielding the same incident-edge privacy as SpeedyMurmurs while eliminating the need to build and maintain global landmark trees or any other shared routing state. Extensive simulations on real snapshots - incorporating churn, silent shutdowns, and random channel saturation - show that T2R boosts end-to-end success by up to 9% and cuts median delay by 1.6× relative to SpeedyMurmurs, all with < 1 kB total overhead and no extra handshakes. Because tickets are processed hop-by-hop and can be prefixed by a trampoline, T2R remains lightweight enough for resource-constrained IoT nodes. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Sajjad Alizadeh and Majid Khabbazian 2025 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 354, 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.30 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-247490 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.30 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode