Lightning Network Bitcoin Layer-2 — instant, off-chain, near-free
Bitcoin payments that clear in a second and cost a satoshi, by moving the action off the base chain into a mesh of payment channels.
A Layer-2 payment protocol built on top of Bitcoin. Participants lock funds into bidirectional payment channels and route value through the resulting mesh in milliseconds, for fractions of a cent in fees. The base chain only sees an opening transaction and a closing transaction; every payment in between is off-chain. First specified by Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja in 2016.
Lightning is what makes a €9 VPS invoice in BTC actually sane.
Base-layer Bitcoin is excellent for settlement and lousy for routine retail payments. A monthly €9 VPS invoice paid on-chain has to absorb a network fee that, depending on mempool congestion, may exceed the invoice itself — and the customer waits ten to sixty minutes to see the credit. That is a hostile user experience, and we considered it the single biggest reason customers historically did not pay hosting in BTC.
Lightning closes the gap. A wallet scans the invoice QR, the payment routes through a couple of intermediary nodes, the credit appears in the panel within seconds and the fee is typically below ten satoshis — a small fraction of a cent. The invoice clears before the customer has put their phone back in their pocket. This is the experience credit cards spent thirty years iterating toward, delivered without a single identity check.
Operationally we run a hybrid setup: a custodial routing node for small invoices, with overflow routed to LND nodes that we operate ourselves and rebalance regularly. Customers never see this; they see an "lnbc..." invoice that resolves in a second. The how-to-pay guide and the self-host-a-node guide cover both sides of the table.
The pages that lean on this term.
The questions people actually ask.
How is Lightning different from regular Bitcoin?
Regular Bitcoin payments settle on the base chain: every payment is a transaction that miners include in a block, with a fee paid for the privilege and a wait of roughly ten minutes per confirmation. Lightning payments settle inside a payment channel between two parties, with no block confirmation required — they are atomic, near-instant and effectively free. The base chain only sees two transactions per channel lifetime: the funding tx that opens it, and the settlement tx that closes it.
Is Lightning private?
More private than base-layer Bitcoin in practice. Routing nodes only learn the channels they sit between, not the full path; payments use onion-style hop encryption similar in spirit to Tor. The privacy is not absolute — a sufficiently well-connected adversary that runs many routing nodes can still infer some flows — but a one-off invoice payment leaks far less than a base-layer transaction does.
What does a Lightning invoice look like?
A long alphanumeric string starting with "lnbc" (mainnet) or "lntb" (testnet), encoded as a bech32 payment request. It contains the amount, an expiry, the payee's node ID and a payment hash. Pasting it into a Lightning wallet shows the amount and routes the payment in one tap.
Do I need to run a Lightning node to pay you?
No. A custodial Lightning wallet (Wallet of Satoshi, Phoenix in custodial mode, Cash App) sends invoices in seconds without running infrastructure. Customers who want non-custodial control can use a mobile node (Phoenix, Breez) or run their own LND/CLN node — there is a guide on this site walking through the self-hosted setup.