DyFEn: Agent-Based Fee Setting in Payment Channel Networks
This work addresses a challenging, unsolved problem in blockchain technology for developers and researchers, though it is incremental as it provides a testbed rather than a novel solution.
The authors tackled the problem of dynamic fee setting in payment channel networks, such as the Bitcoin Lightning Network, by introducing DyFEn, an open-source simulation environment, and reported empirical results from deep reinforcement learning methods as a baseline.
In recent years, with the development of easy to use learning environments, implementing and reproducible benchmarking of reinforcement learning algorithms has been largely accelerated by utilizing these frameworks. In this article, we introduce the Dynamic Fee learning Environment (DyFEn), an open-source real-world financial network model. It can provide a testbed for evaluating different reinforcement learning techniques. To illustrate the promise of DyFEn, we present a challenging problem which is a simultaneous multi-channel dynamic fee setting for off-chain payment channels. This problem is well-known in the Bitcoin Lightning Network and has no effective solutions. Specifically, we report the empirical results of several commonly used deep reinforcement learning methods on this dynamic fee setting task as a baseline for further experiments. To the best of our knowledge, this work proposes the first virtual learning environment based on a simulation of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, unlike many others which are based on physics simulations or game platforms.