This code is for educational purposes only and it should not be used in production.
A Proof-of-Concept implementation of the ALBA protocol, connecting the Lightning Network (LN, a layer-2 on top of Bitcoin) to Ethereum. It allows to verify on Ethereum (or on any other EVM-based chain) the state of a LN channel, either the current state of the channel or an upcoming update thereof.
Costs are evaluated both in the optimistic (both parties are honest and cooperate) and in the pessimistic (one of the parties is adversarial) setting.
This work has been published at the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2025, and it is available on eprint here.
Please make sure that Docker is installed in your commodity laptop. You can download Docker here.
Once Docker is installed, clone this repository. Open a terminal and navigate to the project folder by running
cd /path/to/the/cloned/repository
Build the Docker image by typing the following command within the Alba-Bridge folder:
docker build --no-cache -t alba .
Run the gas cost evaluation of Alba within Docker by executing the following command in your terminal:
docker run alba
This project uses Hardhat to compile, run, and test the smart contracts on a local development network.
This project includes ParseBTCLib.sol a Solidity library for parsing Bitcoin transactions, including signature verification.
It also contains a python folder taken from python-bitcoin-utils and modified to generate protocol-specific LN transactions.
This is a research prototype. We welcome anyone to contribute. File a bug report or submit feature requests through the issue tracker. If you want to contribute feel free to submit a pull request.
Tests for the contract
Tests for the library
