Foundations of Blockchain

Interledger protocol (ILP)

All the payment systems across the world are built to function in a single payment network, and all the assets and transaction details are maintained by a single ledger. Even digital currencies such as Bitcoin maintain all their transactions in a single public ledger, even though copies of the ledger are distributed throughout the network. The transactions can be easily maintained in a single ledger, but it would be difficult to vertically scale such a ledger. We have analyzed the scalability of a single ledger in the Sharding section of this chapter. In addition to this, the diverse payment systems will never agree on a single distributed ledger or its corresponding consensus mechanism. A protocol that can connect ...