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The Lightning Network is the most widely used payment channel network (PCN) to date, making it an attractive attack surface for adversaries. In this paper, we analyze the Lightning Network's PCN topology and investigate its resilience…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2019-04-24 Elias Rohrer , Julian Malliaris , Florian Tschorsch

The Lightning Network, a payment channel network with a market cap of over 192M USD, is designed to resolve Bitcoin's scalability issues through fast off-chain transactions. There are multiple Lightning Network client implementations, all…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Ben Weintraub , Satwik Prabhu Kumble , Cristina Nita-Rotaru , Stefanie Roos

Payment channel networks are an approach to improve the scalability of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. The Lightning Network is a payment channel network built for Bitcoin that is already used in practice. Because the Lightning Network…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Matthias Grundmann , Hannes Hartenstein

Lightning Network (LN) is a widely-used network of payment channels enabling faster and cheaper Bitcoin transactions. In this paper, we outline three ways an attacker can steal funds from honest LN users. The attacks require dilating the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-06-03 Antoine Riard , Gleb Naumenko

Bitcoin has emerged as a revolutionary payment system with its decentralized ledger concept; however it has significant problems such as high transaction fees and low throughput. Lightning Network (LN), which was introduced much later,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Ahmet Kurt , Kemal Akkaya , Sabri Yilmaz , Suat Mercan , Omer Shlomovits , Enes Erdin

As Lightning network payments are neither broadcasted nor publicly stored. Thus LN has been seen not only as scalability but also as privacy solution for Bitcoin. The protocol guarantees that only the latest channel state can be confirmed…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Sergei Tikhomirov , Rene Pickhardt , Alex Biryukov , Mariusz Nowostawski

Leveraging a validated set of reconstructed Lightning Network topology snapshots spanning five years (2019-2023), we computed 47 computationally intensive metrics and network attributes, enabling a comprehensive analysis of the network's…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Danila Valko , Jorge Marx Gómez

The Lightning Network, known for its millisecond settlement speeds and low transaction fees, offers a compelling alternative to traditional payment processors, which often have higher fees and longer processing times. This is particularly…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-12-08 Jeffy Yu

Bitcoin has emerged as a revolutionary payment system with its decentralized ledger concept however it has significant problems such as high transaction fees and long confirmation times. Lightning Network (LN), which was introduced much…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-05-31 Ahmet Kurt , Suat Mercan , Omer Shlomovits , Enes Erdin , Kemal Akkaya

Off-chain transaction channels represent one of the leading techniques to scale the transaction throughput in cryptocurrencies. However, the economic effect of transaction channels on the system has not been explored much until now. We…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-07-15 Simina Brânzei , Erel Segal-Halevi , Aviv Zohar

Bitcoin (BTC) pseudonyms (layer 1) can effectively be deanonymized using heuristic clustering techniques. However, while performing transactions off-chain (layer 2) in the Lightning Network (LN) seems to enhance privacy, a systematic…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-02-11 Matteo Romiti , Friedhelm Victor , Pedro Moreno-Sanchez , Peter Sebastian Nordholt , Bernhard Haslhofer , Matteo Maffei

Blockchain (BC) systems are highly distributed peer-to-peer networks that offer an alternative to centralized services and promise robustness to coordinated attacks. However, the resilience and overall security of a BC system rests heavily…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Aristodemos Paphitis , Nicolas Kourtellis , Michael Sirivianos

Payment channel networks, such as Bitcoin's Lightning Network, promise to improve the scalability of blockchain systems by processing the majority of transactions off-chain. Due to the design, the positioning of nodes in the network…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2021-02-19 Kimberly Lange , Elias Rohrer , Florian Tschorsch

Payment channel networks, and the Lightning Network in particular, seem to offer a solution to the lack of scalability and privacy offered by Bitcoin and other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. Previous research has focused on the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-01-22 George Kappos , Haaroon Yousaf , Ania Piotrowska , Sanket Kanjalkar , Sergi Delgado-Segura , Andrew Miller , Sarah Meiklejohn

Payment channel networks are an approach to improve the scalability of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. Because payment channel networks are used for transfer of financial value, their security in the presence of adversarial participants…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2023-07-06 Matthias Grundmann , Hannes Hartenstein

Lightning Network (LN) addresses the scalability problem of Bitcoin by leveraging off-chain transactions. Nevertheless, it is not possible to run LN on resource-constrained IoT devices due to its storage, memory, and processing…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Ahmet Kurt , Suat Mercan , Enes Erdin , Kemal Akkaya

While various covert botnets were proposed in the past, they still lack complete anonymization for their servers/botmasters or suffer from slow communication between the botmaster and the bots. In this paper, we propose a new generation…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-04-28 Ahmet Kurt , Enes Erdin , Mumin Cebe , Kemal Akkaya , A. Selcuk Uluagac

Bitcoin's success as a cryptocurrency enabled it to penetrate into many daily life transactions. Its problems regarding the transaction fees and long validation times are addressed through an innovative concept called the Lightning Network…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-09-22 Ahmet Kurt , Suat Mercan , Enes Erdin , Kemal Akkaya

The Lightning Network is a scaling solution for Bitcoin that promises to enable rapid and private payment processing. In Lightning, multi-hop payments are secured by utilizing Hashed Time-Locked Contracts (HTLCs) and encrypted on the…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Elias Rohrer , Florian Tschorsch

The functioning of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin relies on the open availability of the entire history of its transactions. This makes it a particularly interesting socio-economic system to analyse from the point of view of network science.…