This page gives a high level overview of the core technology underpinning Connext, particularly how it minimizes the need for the user to trust routers in the network.

Basic State Channels

At the core of Connext is a protocol for state channels.

State channels are a technology that let two parties batch up a set of transactions with arbitrary conditionality among themselves. As an example:

1. Imagine that you want to pay Bob $100 for some work at the rate of $1 per minute.
2. It would be silly to broadcast every $1 transaction to the blockchain as you'd lose lots of money to fees. It also doesn't work to pay Bob upfront or after the work is over because you or Bob could always run away with the money.
3. Instead, you lock your $100 into an escrow contract which requires cryptographic signatures from both you and Bob to unlock a specified amount of funds.
4. Now, rather than onchain transactions, you can simply send Bob signatures for ever-updating amounts of funds. Because Bob can use that signaure to unlock funds and get them onchain at any time, you have effectively completed a new payment to him with every signature.

We can generalize this core concept in one of two ways. First, the above interaction can be extended to any type of transfer by implementing additional conditionality on how the funds are unlocked. For instance, in order to create a time-delayed payment, you could extend the escrow to unlock with both your signature and if a certain number of blocks have passed.

Second, the output of the above interaction can also be any arbitrary

Hopped Transfers

Transferring Across Chains

More Resources

















More Resources

There's a lot more information available publicly on state channels, here are some great resources:

• State channels for babies
• Counterfactual for dummies
• EthHub