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Off-chain transaction networks can mitigate the scalability issues of today's trustless electronic cash systems such as Bitcoin. However, these peer-to-peer networks also introduce a new attack surface which is not well-understood today.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-09-17 Saar Tochner , Stefan Schmid , Aviv Zohar

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

Cryptocurrency off-chain networks such as Lightning (e.g., Bitcoin) or Raiden (e.g., Ethereum) aim to increase the scalability of traditional on-chain transactions. To support nodes in learning about possible paths to route their…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Utz Nisslmueller , Klaus-Tycho Foerster , Stefan Schmid , Christian Decker

Payment channel networks (PCNs) such as the Lightning Network offer an appealing solution to the scalability problem faced by many cryptocurrencies operating on a blockchain such as Bitcoin. However, PCNs also inherit the stringent…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-01-20 Philipp Zabka , Klaus-Tycho Foerster , Stefan Schmid , Christian Decker

Micropayment channels are the most prominent solution to the limitation on transaction throughput in current blockchain systems. However, in practice channels are risky because participants have to be online constantly to avoid fraud, and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-12-03 Georgia Avarikioti , Felix Laufenberg , Jakub Sliwinski , Yuyi Wang , Roger Wattenhofer

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

The Lightning Network (LN) is a second-layer protocol for Bitcoin designed to enable fast and cost-efficient off-chain transactions. Channels in the LN can be closed either by mutual agreement or unilaterally through a forced closure, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Simone Antonelli , Vincent Davis , Harrison Rush , Anthony Potdevin , Jesse Shrader , Vikash Singh , Emanuele Rossi

The Bitcoin Lightning Network is a Layer 2 payment protocol that addresses Bitcoin's scalability by facilitating quick and cost effective transactions through payment channels. This research explores the feasibility of using machine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Vincent Davis , Emanuele Rossi , Vikash Singh

The Bitcoin Lightning Network is a layer 2 protocol designed to facilitate fast and inexpensive Bitcoin transactions. It operates by establishing channels between users, where Bitcoin is locked and transactions are conducted off-chain until…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-07-12 Rainer Feichtinger , Florian Grötschla , Lioba Heimbach , Roger Wattenhofer

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

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

Lightning Network (LN) is designed to amend the scalability and privacy issues of Bitcoin. It's a payment channel network where Bitcoin transactions are issued off chain, onion routed through a private payment path with the aim to settle…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Ferenc Beres , Istvan Andras Seres , Andras A. Benczur

Bitcoin, Ethereum and other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, as deployed today, cannot scale for wide-spread use. A leading approach for cryptocurrency scaling is a smart contract mechanism called a payment channel which enables two…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2017-12-04 Andrew Miller , Iddo Bentov , Ranjit Kumaresan , Christopher Cordi , Patrick McCorry

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

This paper presents a formal analysis of the Lightning Network as a monetary system structurally diverging from Bitcoin's base-layer settlement model. We demonstrate that under increasing transaction demand, BTC transaction fees rise…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Craig Steven Wright

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

Bitcoin blockchain faces the bitcoin scalability problem, for which bitcoin's blocks contain the transactions on the bitcoin network. The on-chain transaction processing capacity of the bitcoin network is limited by the average block…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2018-08-14 Changting Lin , Ning Ma , Xun Wang , Zhenguang Liu , Jianhai Chen , Shouling Ji

Clients of permissionless blockchain systems, like Bitcoin, rely on an underlying peer-to-peer network to send and receive transactions. It is critical that a client is connected to at least one honest peer, as otherwise the client can be…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-07-07 Bithin Alangot , Daniel Reijsbergen , Sarad Venugopalan , Pawel Szalachowski

The ambition of the Lightning Network is to provide a second layer to the Bitcoin network to enable transactions confirmed instantly, securely and anonymously with a world scale capacity using a decentralized protocol. Some of the current…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2020-02-05 Cyril Grunspan , Gabriel Lehéricy , Ricardo Pérez-Marco

We study a random process over graphs inspired by the way payments are executed in the Lightning Network, the main layer-two solution on top of Bitcoin. We first prove almost tight upper and lower bounds on the time it takes for a payment…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Taki E. M. Abedesselam , Fabio Giacomelli , Francesco Pasquale , Michele Salvi