10 CONCLUSIONS

Lightning Network scales Bitcoin payments via two-party payment channels and routing, although it may be bounded in terms of scaling and usability by its design.

We propose CoinPool, a covenant-based payment pool construction, which takes the idea of sharing UTXO ownership to the next level. In CoinPool, Bitcoin users lock funds in many accounts within a single UTXO to instantly transact across the pool without much on-chain footprint; or use their accounts inside the pool for advanced protocols (e.g., payment channels), possibly even connected to other CoinPools or the LN. CoinPool users can withdraw their funds from the pool at any time.

CoinPool introduces an alternative set of trade-offs: users get increased funds velocity and use Bitcoin throughput more efficiently, at the cost of high interactivity required by pool participants. CoinPool requires modifications to the Bitcoin protocol.