  The Bitcoin scalability problem has led to the development of off-chain
financial mechanisms such as payment channel networks (PCNs) which help users
process transactions of varying amounts, including micro-payment transactions,
without writing each transaction to the blockchain. Since PCNs only allow
path-based transactions, effective, secure routing protocols that find a path
between a sender and receiver are fundamental to PCN operations. In this paper,
we propose RACED, a routing protocol that leverages the idea of Distributed
Hash Tables (DHTs) to route transactions in PCNs in a fast and secure way. Our
experiments on real-world transaction datasets show that RACED gives an average
transaction success ratio of 98.74%, an average pathfinding time of 31.242
seconds, which is $1.65*10^3$, $1.8*10^3$, and $4*10^2$ times faster than three
other recent routing protocols that offer comparable security/privacy
properties. We rigorously analyze and prove the security of RACED in the
Universal Composability framework.
