Lightning Network Becomes More Centralized, Researchers Say
Lightning Network Becomes More Centralized, Researchers Say

The Lightning Network (LN) is becoming more centralized and vulnerable to attacks, says a new research paper.

LN is a payment network that allows for fast and cheap transactions, which was presented as a potential solution to the scalability problem of Bitcoin.

Researchers Jian-Hun Lin, Kevin Primikerio, Tiziano Skvartini, Christian Decker and Claudio J. Tessone in their article concluded that the wealth in the Lightning network is “unevenly distributed” since a smaller part of the nodes gradually accumulate a large share of Bitcoins.

For example, researchers found that 10% of nodes control 80% of the Lightning network. If most of the bitcoins are stored on several nodes, the network will become more vulnerable to attacks, and the loss of these routing nodes will be akin to gaping holes.

“The loss of hubs will lead to the breakdown of the network into many components … and the network may become the target for the so-called split attacks [splitting attacks],” the document says.

However, Christian Decker from Blockstream tweeted that this state of affairs does not bother him. In his opinion, this temporary trend towards centralization. He and other LN developers “are working to make it easier for carriers to create duplicate channels on the network.”

Author: Marko Vidrih

Featured image credit: Pixabay
['Marko Vidrih']
['Lightning Network', 'Cryptocurrency News', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain']