Off-chain Ethereum is already here!

Picture of Canvas app that uses off-chain Ethereum to draw stuff

Off-chain scaling solutions represent a popular scalability direction in major blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Lightning Network (LN) has been active on Bitcoin and Litecoin networks for a few months now. The number of nodes participating in LN has been steadily growing. This left Ethereum fans waiting for similar solutions for the Ethereum blockchain.

Raiden Network (https://raiden.network/) is one of the earliest projects to tackle this problem. They are building a system that is based on two-party payments channels like LN. Other projects like Liquidity Network (https://Liquidity.Network) took a different approach by using multi-party payment channels to route the off-chain Ethereum transactions. This results in a system that consists of payment hubs where each hub connects a large number of users. Users can send off-chain ETH transactions for free allowing for even tiny amounts of ETH to be transferred.

Liquidity Network has recently launched their public beta wallet that works on the mainnet Ethereum network. As any beta release, the wallet is highly experimental and should not be used with any significant amounts of Ethereum. To showcase how the wallet and the Liquidity Network would work, they have also built an app called Canvas where users can draw some shapes using off-chain ETH. This app is similar to the popular Shatoshis.Place app that works on the Bitcoin LN. However, Canvas (https://canvas.liquidity.network) is much cheaper to use. It charges 1 Wei ( 10^-18 ETH) per pixel.

I decided to give Canvas a try so I transferred a tiny amount of ETH to a new MetaMask account. I used the Liquidity Network web wallet to move an even smaller amount of this ETH amount off-chain. The process was easy enough and only required signing a few messages using MetaMask. After that, the fun part started as I started drawing some stuff in there. Some people are really fun like those who have drawn the turtles or the guy who celebrated France wining the world cup :) However, for your artwork to be saved, you have to checkout and pay a few Wei using the Liquidity web wallet.

Overall, the experience was fun and super cheap. However, if you want to try it yourself, you have to be very cautious and only use tiny amounts of funds. The wallet is still in beta and very experimental.