Real-time Money Routing by Trusting Strangers with your Funds

Abstract

We explore a new stage in the evolution of digital trust, trusting strangers with your funds. We address the trust issues when giving money to others and relying on them to forward it. For fraud identification, we leverage our deployed blockchain which gradually builds trust between interacting strangers. Our blockchain fabric, called TrustChain, records interactions between entities in a scalable manner. This work represents a small step towards a generic infrastructure for trust, moving beyond proven single vendor platforms like eBay, Uber and Airbnb.

Expanding upon established trust relations, we designed, implemented and evaluated an overlay network: Internet-of-Money. Internet-of-Money routes money to different banks through individuals, so-called money routers. This removes the need for central banks, to handle a payment. Our network reduces the duration of traditional inter-bank payments from up to a day and even a few days during weekends, to mere seconds. Internet-of-Money is fully decentralized, scalable and privacy-preserving.

With real-world experimentations, we prove that Internet-of-Money enables fast money forwarding. We show that the overlay network is capable of discovering a majority of available money routers within a minute. Finally, we demonstrate how profit of cheating routers is limited and that misbehaviour is punished.