Proposal: Resizing Lightning Channels Off-Chain With Hierarchical Channels

"It's hoped that hierarchical channels will eventually be adopted in BOLTs and implemented in order to improve the scalability, efficiency, and usability of the Lightning network."

Proposal: Resizing Lightning Channels Off-Chain With Hierarchical Channels
  • Dynamic management of Lightning channel capacity is required to support efficient Lightning Network (LN) payments.
    - On-chain resizing introduces delays, adds costs and limits scalability.
    -  Fast and cheap resizing may be required to support watchtower-free LN payments for casual users.
    - Channel factories allow off-chain channel resizing, but only by exchanging capacity within a single factory.
  • Hierarchical channels allow flexible, off-chain resizing of channels.
    - They don't require an exchange of capacity within a limited pool of users.
    - They also support watchtower-free casual users without stranding any channel capacity.
  • Hierarchical channels do for channel capacity what the LN does for bitcoin.
  • No change to the underlying Bitcoin protocol is required.

Full Proposal
Archive