Study: Low reliability to successfully route payments in the Lightning Network

A study made by Diar has revealed that "the reliability of successfully routing a payment in the Lightning Network it's still pretty low. "Diar provides analysis of significant developments within the global digital currency industry. The Lightning Network (LN) is the second layer payment protocol designed to solve the scalability problem of Bitcoin (BTC). The LN supposedly allows almost instantaneous, low cost and scalable transactions between two parties. Although the LN protocol was very well accepted by the crypto community after its publication in January of this year, the study suggests that the protocol stumbles when processing large quantities. According to the study, the number of nodes and the capacity of the fund has been growing steadily, but the reliability of successfully routing a payment in the LN remains quite low, especially in regard to larger amounts. On average, each node contains more than four open channels and each channel has an average capacity of $ 20. The probability of a successful payment transaction with no more than a few dollars is 70 percent, while the success rate for a payment of less than $ 200 is 1 percent. Another point of conflict, which leads to the criticism of the LN, is that both parties involved in a transaction have to be online at the time the transaction occurs. It is more appropriate to create a channel with someone who is always online and has sufficient liquidity to route larger transactions, says the study.

"The lack of liquidity between the nodes, and the online factor, has led to the concentration of capacity in a few large nodes, Ten of the largest LN nodes (0.4% of total nodes) currently have 53% of the capacity of the network, while the remaining 2,500 nodes have 47% ".

According to the study, in order to successfully route a transaction through a channel, a larger amount loaded on a channel is required than the one that is being sent to the other party. "If the transaction can not be sent to the requested recipient, it fails and the funds are returned to the sender," he says. Recently, the LN was used by a Portuguese software engineer who created "Poketoshi", a platform that allows users to play the Nintendo Pokemon game in the LN. Poketoshi implements a virtual controller enabled for the Lightning Network for users to enter their game commands, loading 10 Satoshi per command, being a Satoshi equal to one hundred millionth of a single BTC.

In April, the first user mobile wallet created for the LN was He launched and was available for Android users in Google Play Store. The technology allows users to send payments by Lightning, which should theoretically cost a fraction of the normal rates of the BTC network and confirm it almost instantaneously.