While looking for related work on Interledger, I came across the GEO Protocol. The corresponding whitepaper mentions that ILP is the “closest to GEO among all off-chain solutions”.
Differences the whitepaper states, regarding…
- Topology collection and routing algorithm
In contrast [to ILP], GEO Protocol processes transactions in a distributed fashion: each node only knows its first-level connections. Routing is limited to 6 hops (7 participants).
- Atomicity
In GEO Protocol, there is full atomicity due to Observer chain that provides assurances of payment finality. Observers in GEO Protocol are responsible for resolving conflicts in situations where a transaction counterparty or intermediary disconnects from the network or withholds critical data.
- Multi-path payments
When there is not enough capacity to perform a payment through one direct path, GEO Protocol splits the transaction into several paths, all of which are part of the same atomically finalized process. This ensures increased maximum flow in the network. Before the actual payment starts, it is possible to predict the maximum volume that can be transferred between the sender and the recipient by considering all available paths.
For large payments, ILP uses an approach based on STREAM Protocol that splits larger transfers into smaller packets and sends them as quickly as the network can support. This does not ensure atomicity for the whole payment, which limits the applicability of ILP in the real-world environment.
What do you guys think about this?
There was another post few months back on the differences of ILP to FUSION and I think it might make sense to have these resources for newcomers. It’d ease choosing the right technology for the problem.